Press Release

Oct 12, 2015
Cytox announces participation in INSIGHT Alzheimer’s study

Participation will aid comparison of SNP genotyping with biomarker status

Oxford, UK. Cytox Ltd, an innovative developer of assays for risk assessment and prediction of dementia, has confirmed its participation in the pioneering French INSIGHT study of Alzheimer’s disease (AD).  The Cytox proposal, ‘SNP Profiling as an Approach to Risk Stratification for Future Cognitive Decline in Elderly Subjective Memory Complainers’, has been reviewed and approved by the INSIGHT Scientific Committee.  

INSIGHT is a study of Alzheimer’s disease and one of the first in the world to monitor healthy subjects at risk. Led by Professor Harald Hampel, AXA-UPMC Chair at Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France and Professor Bruno Dubois, Director of IM2A (Institute of Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease, located at La Pitié Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris), and based at the ICM (Brain and Spine Institute, Paris), the study is a collaboration with Pfizer and Avid. The project involves monitoring 350 healthy volunteer subjects aged 70-85 years, with normal memory function that are stratified in a group that is amyloid-positive and a control group that is negative as defined by PET. Its objective is not to detect or treat disease, but to observe changes in these healthy subjects eventually progressing to first clinical symptoms related to Alzheimer’s disease. The seven-year study is being conducted at the IM2A and ICM. INSIGHT is an ancillary study of the French MEMENTO national cohort.

This affords Cytox an excellent opportunity to generate initial cross-sectional data according to Dr. Richard Pither, CEO of Cytox, “All of these subjects in Paris have been assessed in an internationally unique mono-centre setting using an extensive range of standardized methods, clinical and biomarkers, allowing us to compare our SNP genotyping results with biomarker status, including CSF and PET-amyloid imaging, and then, in time, longitudinal data as these subjects are followed up in coming years. These samples are likely to represent a good proportion of our first genotyping analysis using the Cytox-Affymetrix genoTOR MKI Research array.”