Name in original language
VUB, UZ Brussel, ULB, Hôpital Erasme, Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL), and Cliniques Universitaires St. Luc
Initiative overview
In Belgium, an estimated 200,000 people suffer from dementia, with around 6% of them being under 65 years of age. The most common cause is Alzheimer’s disease, responsible for 70% of dementia cases in the region. Alzheimer’s is also the leading cause of death in Belgium. The disease causes the loss of brain cells and the breakdown of connections between them, leading to memory loss and cognitive decline. However, many questions about the origins of Alzheimer’s remain unanswered, partly because privacy laws have made the sharing of patient data for collaborative research challenging.
To address this need, researchers in the Translate-AD project will develop a digital platform to facilitate the exchange of expertise and patient data between university hospitals. This will enable the identification of biomarkers – the ‘fingerprints’ of diseases that predict whether someone has or will develop a condition. The project will improve diagnosis and prognosis, a milestone in treating a disease whose progression is difficult to predict. Additionally, a better understanding of the disease will likely lead to new therapeutic possibilities.
The platform will allow researchers to tackle even the most complex research questions together, without the need to exchange patient data. A research question will be translated into a script, which is then sent from a central research computer to local hospital servers. All data analyses will be conducted on these local servers, where anonymised patient data is stored. Once complete, the results of the data analysis are sent from the local servers back to the central research computer. This approach makes research collaboration far easier while fully respecting privacy regulations.
