The University of Eastern Finland is one of the partners in the pan-European PROMINENT project funded through the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI). PROMINENT will create a digital platform for precision medicine to improve the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative disease and co-morbidities. The overriding objective is to assist clinicians with individualised decision support in the evaluation of patients with suspected cognitive impairment.
PROMINENT is a public-private partnership funded by the IHI for a period of five years. The PROMINENT consortium brings together experts in neurodegenerative diseases and clinical neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), health economics, and patient advocacy. Project partners also include some of Europe’s leading medical centres for the diagnosis and treatment of cognitive disorders.
“Our team at the UEF Brain Research Unit has a key role in the clinical evaluation and validation studies. Due to the burden of neurodegenerative diseases, the project will have a great impact on society”, says Eino Solje, Director of the UEF Brain Research Unit.
“This is particularly important given that e.g. Eastern Finland has a high morbidity index, including high dementia-related morbidity levels”, says Alina Solomon, Associate Professor of Neuroepidemiology.
Our team at the UEF Brain Research Unit has a key role in the clinical evaluation and validation studies. Due to the burden of neurodegenerative diseases, the project will have a great impact on society.
Improving the management of Alzheimer’s disease
The first application for PROMINENT will be in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which affects over 20 million people in Europe. The prevalence of AD is expected to double over the next three decades. However, diagnosis and management are challenging due to the high incidence of comorbidities, such as cardiovascular and psychiatric conditions. By taking into account individual differences in patients’ genes, lifestyles and clinical parameters, precision medicine has the potential to dramatically improve diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of AD.
“With a large ageing population and an ambition to maintain good health into the higher ages, Europe has a great need for precision medicine systems that can support clinicians with diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative conditions, and provide support to patients and their care partners.” said PROMINENT Principal Investigator, Dr Linus Jönsson, Professor of Health Economics at Karolinska Institutet.
“PROMINENT will leverage digital tools and biomarkers together with advanced analytics to increase the accuracy of AD diagnosis and prognosis, paving the way for the introduction of new health technologies that will improve the lives of patients and care partners.”
The PROMINENT digital platform
A core outcome for PROMINENT will be its digital platform, which will leverage existing tools for AI-based image analysis developed by project co-Principal Investigator, Dr Jyrki Lötjönen from Combinostics. Building on these tools, PROMINENT will develop an open, interoperable platform capable of interacting with a wide range of systems to integrate multi-modal diagnostic data.
Powered by innovative prognostic and diagnostic algorithms, the PROMINENT platform will enable personalised prediction of patient-relevant outcomes as well as evidence-based recommendations for clinical management. Patients and care partners will receive understandable, personalised information on their brain health, and clinicians will benefit from these novel decision support tools that will guide them on the optimal diagnostic and therapeutic pathways.
Enabling real-world implementation
Beyond establishing a digital platform for precision medicine, PROMINENT will pave the way for implementation in healthcare systems across Europe, using established co-creation approaches to meaningfully involve clinicians, patients and care partners along with representatives of regulatory agencies, health technology assessment bodies (HTA), and payers.
A prospective evaluation study led by the University of Cologne will assess how well the decision support system provides relevant, actionable information to clinicians, patients and care partners. Detailed feedback from interviews and surveys will facilitate iterative improvements to the PROMINENT system and user experience. A prospective validation study (led by Region Stockholm) will determine the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of the platform, and assess clinical confidence in diagnosis before and after accessing the PROMINENT platform.
With new disease-modifying therapies for AD on the horizon, there is a real need to support the introduction and optimal use of these novel drugs, and provide evidence for regulators, HTA bodies, and payers. PROMINENT will rise to this challenge by supporting clinicians to ensure adherence with appropriate use guidelines, and by developing a framework for real-world evidence generation, delivering measurable improvements in clinical diagnosis, patient management, uptake of novel health technologies, and cost-effectiveness.
"Precision medicine is the future of healthcare, and with the PROMINENT project, we are taking a significant step forward in enhancing the diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Our goal is to provide clinicians with individualised decision support and improve patient outcomes through personalised prediction models as well as evidence-based recommendations. With the collaboration of our esteemed partners, we are confident that PROMINENT will transform the way we approach cognitive impairment and ultimately improve the lives of patients across Europe," Jönsson said.
The PROMINENT project is coordinated by Karolinska Institutet, and partners include Combinostics Oy, Combinostics US Inc., Synapse Research Management Partners Sl, Alzheimer Europe, Region Stockholm, BioArctic AB, Klinikum der Universität Zu Köln, IHE, Institutet för Hälso- och Sjukvårdsekonomi, Fundacio Barcelonabeta Brain Research Center, CHU Hopitaux de Bordeaux, Univerzitetni Klinicni Center Ljubljana, University of Eastern Finland, and Stichting Vumc.
The PROMINENT project has a budget of 11,069,750 € from which 6,069,750 € is funded by IHI and 5,000,000 € is committed by the contributing partners. The share of funding for the University of Eastern Finland is 372 125 €. The project is supported by the Innovative Health Initiative Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101112145. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and COCIR, EFPIA, EuropaBio MedTech Europe, Vaccines Europe, BioArctic AB and Combinostics Oy.
Follow the project on Twitter @IHI_PROMINENT and LinkedIn to stay up-to-date.
For further information, please contact:
Principal Investigator: Linus Jönsson, Karolinska Institutet, linus.jonsson@ki.se
Co-Principal Investigator: Jyrki Lötjönen, Combinostics, jyrki.lotjonen@combinostics.com
