BRUSSELS. In January the AETIONOMY consortium started a project aiming to develop a new way to classify Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. The 5-year-project is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA. The new classification will be generated using data derived from a wide range of new biological approaches and will be based on the underlying causes of the disease. Currently, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are classified by their symptoms and severity but it is clear that this does not represent the many different causes of these diseases. It has been widely recognised that within these broad disease groups there are sub-groups where the different causes result in the symptoms of memory loss or movement disorder.

The AETIONOMY project will involve the collection of all available data including clinical data, imaging and genetic data and will create a new way to combine all the data together to look for patterns which could identify sub-groups of patients with similar causes of their disease. The project will run for the next 5 years and will include a Clinical Study, which aims at a validation of the “mechanism-based taxonomy” generated in the course of the first years.

AETIONOMY is a collaboration of 17 partners across 11 countries and is led by Professor Duncan McHale from UCB Pharma and Professor Martin Hofmann-Apitius from the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI). The collaboration is funded as part of the IMI Taxonomy Call (Call 8) which aims at improving the way we classify diseases to ensure patients get the right drugs and to improve how we find new drugs. The collaboration includes 4 EFPIA Pharmaceutical companies (UCB, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis and Boehringer Ingelheim), 2 SMEs, 9 Academic institutions and 2 patient advocacy groups.
 

Project info *

• Start date: 01/01/2014
• Duration: 5 years

Project finance *

• IMI funding: €8.0 million
• EFPIA in-kind: €8.0 million
• Other: €1.8 million
• Total cost: €17.8 million
• The research leading to these results has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° [115568], resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies’ in kind contribution.

Find out more

• 8th Call for proposals topic text:
  http://www.imi.europa.eu/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/8th_Call/
  IMI_8thCallText_FINAL.pdf (p. 45 onwards)
• Press release on launch of 8th Call (December 2012):
  http://www.imi.europa.eu/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/Press%20Releases/
  Press_Release_8thCallLaunch_FINAL.pdf
• AETIONOMY Website: http://www.aetionomy.eu
  

Contact

Laurent Schots
Media Relations, UCB
Phone: +32 2 559 9264
laurent.schots(at)ucb.com

Prof. Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius
Head of the Department of Bioinformatics
Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany
Phone: +49 2241 14 2802
martin.hofmann-apitius(at)scai.fraunhofer.de

Disclaimer

This communication reflects the author's view and that neither IMI nor the European Union and EFPIA are liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. For more information please contact either Prof. Duncan McHale (duncan.mchale(at)ucb.com) or Prof. Martin Hofmann-Apitius (martin.hofmann-apitius(at)scai.fraunhofer.de).