EU grants €9m to Alzheimer’s project
Nadine project will develop lab-on-a-chip to detect different types of dementia
A consortium of 18 partners has embarked on the development of a lab-on-a-chip to detect Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. The Nadine (NAnosystems for early Diagnosis of NEurogenerative Diseases) project is funded by the EU’s 7th Framework programme for nanotechnology.
Over a five-year period, the project aims to develop a miniaturised detection system to be used by a doctor for routine screening to see whether a patient is likely to develop a neurodegenerative disease such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Miniaturised systems are said to offer a lot of advantages over big laboratories as they allow more sensitive tests to be done with much smaller samples, thus making it possible to perform more frequent and more widespread screenings.
The project requires 18 partners because many technical specialities will be merged in the development of the system. The system is complex and will mainly be based on expertise in cell biology, micro- and nanotechnology and biochemistry. Among the partners are the French Marie Curie Institute, the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, in addition to four small technology-based companies to participate in the development and later commercially exploit the results.
More than 7 million Europeans are currently diagnosed with dementia, mostly Alzheimer´s disease, resulting in a total annual cost of around €160bn for healthcare systems across the EU.
DTU Nanotech, a department at the Technical University of Denmark, experienced in designing, manufacturing and working with lab-on-a-chip systems, is leading the project. The coordinator is Professor Jörg Peter Kutter, a specialist in microfluidics, the underlying technology used to transport very small amounts of liquid sample material (such as blood) through lab-on-a-chip devices.
Kutter said: ‘Such large projects are needed in order to really move the state-of-the-art in a scientific area. Hopefully, the diagnostic devices developed in this project will quickly make their way into the hospitals and doctor’s offices around Europe.’
The Nadine partners are:
- Danmarks Tekniske Universitet, DTU Nanotech, Denmark
- Université Paris-Sud XI, France
- Univerzita Pardubice, Czech Republic
- Ustav Makromolekularni Chemie, Czech Republic
- Institut Curie, France
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France
- Universität Ulm, Germany
- Universitätsklinikum Essen, Germany
- DiagnoSwiss, Switzerland
- Fluigent, France
- Moravian-Biotechnology, Czech Republic
- Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Sweden
- Itä-Suomen Yliopisto, Finland
- Instituto di Chimica del Riconoscimento Moleculare, Italy
- Institut Catalá de Nanotecnologia, Spain
- Association pour la Recherche et le Développement, France
- Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, France
- Rambøll, Denmark