Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) announced today which projects will be supported in its ICON call for Personalized Medicine. One of them is Mission Lucidity's PRISMA project, "Polygenic Risc scoring and deep-Immunophenotyping Strategy to Master Alzheimer’s disease", that receives €4.56 million. An additional €1.88 million will be invested in the project by its industry partners (see below).

The project is focused on linking the polygenic risk scores of Alzheimer's patients with changes in microglial function, such as brain immune responses, which are increasingly linked to neurodegeneration. This will allow to divide patients in meaningful subgroups, each with their own risk profile and underlying disease mechanisms. Ultimately, this approach will make it possible to test targeted interventions in mechanism-based patient subgroups, and is a next step towards personalized medicine.

The team is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Bart De Strooper (VIB-KU Leuven) and also includes Prof. Dr. Rik Vandenberghe (UZ Leuven/KU Leuven), Prof. Dr. Isabelle Cleynen (KU Leuven), Prof. Dr. Stephanie Humblet-Baron (KU Leuven) and Dr. Dries Braeken (imec). 

The PRISMA consortium further consists of industry partners involved in life science data integration and visualization (Ontoforce), phenotyping screening for Alzheimer's drug discovery (reMYND) and strategic management and economics for healthcare (Hict).