Press Release

Nov 2, 2015
CTAD 2015 presentation on the application of SNP profiling to risk stratification in Alzheimer’s disease

SNP profiling approach in Alzheimer’s disease risk assessment to be highlighted at Barcelona meeting

Oxford, UK. Cytox Ltd, an innovative developer of assays for risk assessment and prediction of dementia, has announced that it will be presenting a poster at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease Conference, CTAD 2015, Barcelona, Spain, November 5-7th, discussing SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) profiling for risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementias.

The poster, P2-16, ‘The Application of SNP Profiling to the Risk Stratification for Future Cognitive Decline in Mild Cognitive Impairment’, will be displayed on Friday November 6th, between 11.00am and 17:00pm as part of the CTAD Clinical trials Imaging Poster Session 2, in the Gaudi Mezzanine Level at the Gran Hotel Princesa Sofia. The authors are Dr Valentina Escott-Price, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom; Dr Richard Pither and Julie Davis, Cytox Ltd, Oxford, United Kingdom; Professor Harald Hampel, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France; Professor Rik Vandenberghe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium; Professor John Hardy and Maryam Shoai, UCL Institute of Neurology, London, United Kingdom. Dr Escott-Price will be available during the poster sessions that day: 11:00 - 11.30am, 13:00 - 13.30pm and 16.30 - 17:00pm, for discussion.

The CTAD poster presents data from an ongoing wider research study to investigate the application of SNP profiling to risk stratification in AD.

Cytox leads a consortium, comprising Dr Zsuzsanna Nagy (University of Birmingham), Professor John Hardy and Dr Valentina Escott-Price, as an expert consultant in statistical genetics to the project team, which has received a substantial funding award from Innovate UK. The project aims to identify genetic risk variants, or SNPs, which can be used ultimately, in the definition of an algorithm to predict AD progression. In turn, this would be expected to facilitate AD clinical trials by reducing both misdiagnosis rates and enabling better prediction of expected disease progression rates.  The consortium is carrying out whole exome association analysis (testing genetic variants across the genome in highly selected and characterised clinical samples) and further applying disease risk prediction modelling to quantify the utility of the associated variants.

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) may be a prodromal state for AD and over half of these patients are at high risk of progression to AD. Current prognostic methods for AD are only 25-30% accurate in early MCI. The lack of validated biomarkers hampers clinical management of AD and the production of new therapies.

More information about the event can be found on the CTAD Conference website www.ctad-alzheimer.com/. More information about the presentation can be found after the Conference in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease, www.jpreventionalzheimer.com/.