Press Release

Mar 13, 2019
Cardiff University and Cytox to present further results on the implementation of SNPfitR analytical platform in identifying individuals for Alzheimer’s clinical trials at AD/PD conference in Lisbon

Study to show high accuracy of SNPfitR in predicting Alzheimer’s risk in both carriers and non-carriers of ApoE4

13th March 2019: Oxford & Manchester, UK. Cytox, a precision medicine company which today is commercializing polygenic risk scoring (PRS) approaches for assessing genetic risk for developing Alzheimer’s (AD) and other neurological diseases, has announced that in collaboration with Cardiff University it will be making a poster and short oral presentation at the multidisciplinary 14th International Conference on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases and related neurological disorders (AD/PD™ 2019), March 26-31 in Lisbon, Portugal. The presentation will share results on the high accuracy of Cytox’s pioneering SNPfitRTM, an analytical software platform that contains multiple PRS algorithms, in predicting clinical Alzheimer’s disease in both carriers and non-carriers of ApoE4 risk allele, with validation and optimization in independent, well-characterized cohorts, including the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI). In addition, the prediction accuracy in carriers was significantly increased compared with the accuracy achieved using ApoE (E4/E2), age and gender.

Poster 249 titled, ‘The Utility of Polygenic Risk Scores to Identify Individuals for Clinical Trials in Alzheimer’s Disease’, will be displayed all day on Wednesday March 27th, as part of the ‘Imaging, Biomarkers, Diagnostics: Other’ session in the Exhibition Hall at the Lisbon Congress Centre and an oral presentation will be given by Eftychia Bellou, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom, in the Short Oral Session 02 – Presentations of Selected Posters on Thursday March 28th, 09:15 - 11:15, Auditorium V.

Richard Pither, CEO of Cytox, commented “The importance of Cytox’s PRS approach is gaining increasing attention for estimating individual genetic risk profile and disease risk prediction in Alzheimer’s – essential in the selection of individuals for clinical trials and cohort studies. Recent results from an international collaborative study have validated this, including how we identify Alzheimer’s disease risk in ApoE3 homozygote individuals. The results we are presenting at AD/PD further show that SNPfitR provides a valuable platform for determining genetic risk in dementia in both carriers and non-carriers of ApoE4, with the advantage of requiring only blood or saliva-extracted DNA, thus reducing reliance on expensive PET imaging procedures.”