Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) has awarded a 2-year, $75,000 Innovation and Translational Research Award to Dr. Thalia Field and the CANARY team.
Meeting the health care needs of dynamic patient populations requires forward-thinking innovators. From curing disease to improving quality of life, researchers are at the forefront of medical advances that support the health and happiness of patients and their families. Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute (VCHRI) is proud to contribute to visionary research with our annual Innovation and Translational Research Awards. This year’s five recipients are putting new knowledge into practice, implementing research outcomes and turning discoveries into commercial opportunities.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common, devastating and costly condition with no cure. To date, drug trials have failed in part due to the difficulty in identifying individuals with early stage disease, when disease-modifying drugs would be most likely to be effective.
“Our objectives are to refine and validate a multimodal machine learning algorithm to distinguish healthy individuals from those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild to moderate AD,” says Dr. Thalia Field.
The study will gather longitudinal data to discern risk markers for those individuals with subjective memory complaints/ MCI likeliest to develop AD.
“Our ultimate aim is for our algorithm to help in risk-stratifying individuals with regards to their risk of pre-clinical disease as a means to enrich future clinical trials examining treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.”