To facilitate the development of new drugs for Alzheimer's disease, VUB, ULB, UZ Brussel and the Brussels start-up Digita.AI are going to detect the disease at a very early stage. They will use a new special magnetic OPM (Optically Pumped Magnetometers) scanner for this purpose, which can image the functioning of the brain in much more detail than conventional brain scanners. For this, the researchers will receive EUR 1.2 million from Innoviris, the Brussels agency for technology and innovation within the call ‘Research Platforms: New Approaches of Testing’. Alzheimer's disease is incurable and affects 1 in 9 people over the age of 65.
To confirm that someone has Alzheimer's disease, an examination is carried out by a doctor. This includes memory tests and invariably includes a brain scan that shows where the brain has shrunk or where there are clumped proteins that could indicate Alzheimer's.
To treat Alzheimer's disease in the future, it is crucial that the disease can be detected at an early stage. One technique that can help with this is magnetoencephalography. The classical scanners used for this work with sensors that need to be cooled with liquid Helium. These super-cooled sensors have the major disadvantage that they cannot simply be applied to the skull skin, as they would cause too much damage. As a result, the resolution of the images is relatively small.
‘In patients where the disease is already advanced, doctors can clearly observe altered brain activity,’ says Jeroen Van Schependom, Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Engineering and Medicine and Pharmacy and a member of the ETRO and AIMS research groups. ‘On a classic MRI image, you can see the effects of the shrinking brain reasonably well, but the imaging leaves much to be desired for Alzheimer's disease. Unfortunately, as a result, the diagnosis is usually made when the disease is already at an advanced stage, leaving only attempts to slow down the further deterioration process with medication. We think that if we can make the diagnosis much earlier, we will have a much better chance of controlling that process with existing medication.’
This is where the new scanner can play a prominent role. Because the new electromagnetic scanner does not require the use of cooled sensors, it is possible to place the sensors much closer to the cranial skin, which also allows them to capture a much stronger signal and makes the image much sharper and more detailed. ‘Moreover, we can localise the signal much more precisely as we have also recently demonstrated for epilepsy,’ says Professor Xavier De Tiège, neurologist and head of the MEG unit (ULB).
With the new scanner, researchers can detect much faster if parts of the brain are failing or becoming less performant - in the early stages of the disease process, these are sometimes small abnormalities - and can diagnose Alzheimer's much faster.
Another important factor in the treatment of Alzheimer's patients is the long-term monitoring of their disease process. For this, the researchers will collaborate with Digita.AI, a Brussels-based start-up that works with so-called datapods. ‘We want to detect Alzheimer's disease as early as possible,’ Van Schependom clarifies. ‘That means keeping personal data for a very long time. To solve that problem, Digita.AI has developed a system in which everyone has a personal digital safe to store their medical data. In this, patients retain ownership of their data and can decide to make it available for follow-up research. Patients can manage their data themselves, possibly with the help of their families. With those data lockers, a kind of small servers actually, we can follow up patients in the longer term.’
