PhD candidate: EPND project - Biomarkers for early identification of Alzheimer’s disease

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is among the most common neurodegenerative conditions with a huge economic burden. Treatments that can prevent the disease or modify disease progression are still lacking. One of the key barriers to effective development of these treatments is an incomplete toolbox of biomarkers. The development of effective treatments requires biomarkers for early detection of disease in individuals, for assessing treatment efficacy, and for patient stratification. While AD is one of the few neurodegenerative diseases with some established biomarkers, even these do not capture the molecular complexity of the disease.

The European Platform for Neurodegenerative Diseases (EPND, https://epnd.org ) aims to develop a self-sustainable platform for storage and analysis of high quality clinical and biological samples and data collections. This will facilitate access to samples and data to accelerate biomarker discovery and validation, and eventually support the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases. EPND will build further on existing initiatives such as EMIF-AD.

The PhD student is responsible for successful integration of large clinical datasets and bio samples of European Alzheimer’s disease cohorts into EPND in order to develop a sustainable network across all cohorts. To this end, information (meta data) on cohorts will be collected, and data and samples will be identified and centrally merged and stored. By using data collected as part of EPND, the PhD student will investigate the role of amyloid, tau, and neurodegeneration biomarkers for early identification and prognosis of Alzheimer’s disease. Furthermore, proteins in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid will be examined to unravel additional underlying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease. The PhD student will be part of a research team with ample experience in large-scale international and clinical research on cognition and biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease. Depending on background and Dutch language proficiency, the PhD student will additionally perform clinical work at the Alzheimer Centrum Limburg of the Academic Hospital of Maastricht.