"Mechanisms and measurement of disease progression in the early phase of neurodegenerative diseases” - EU Joint Programme - Neurodegenerative Disease Research (JPND)

In the context of ERA-NET JPcofuND 2 (JPND), ANR launches a joint transnational call with the aim of improving the understanding of disease mechanisms and advancing measurability of disease progression at early and pre-symptomatic stages of neurodegenerative diseases.

The research approaches should be integrative, combining relevant scientific approaches (e.g. clinical, epidemiological, molecular, experimental) and involve state-of-the art methodology and techniques. The potential of existing cohorts and data sets should be exploited. Proposals must be hypothesis-driven and should have a strong emphasis on reliable methodology.

Proposals submitted under this call may include, but are not limited to, the following types of research:

• Unraveling the influence of molecular, physiological, psychological and social factors and pathways on disease progression as well as discovering new factors and pathways.
   
• Defining key regulatory steps affecting the disease onset and progression.
   
• Combining molecular, psychological, social and physiological markers in order to increase the robustness of the diagnosis.
   
• Harmonization of the use of novel technologies and clinical measures to increase reliability and reproducibility of disease detection and monitoring.
   
• Identifying molecular, environmental, social and behavioral modulators of disease progression with the ultimate aim of determining risk, protective and resilience factors.
   
• Examining pathological processes related to neurodegeneration by using Artificial Intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies to understand the role of mechanistic pathways.
   
• Enhancing patient stratification by establishing measures and technologies to characterize clinical subgroups at pre-symptomatic stages, e.g. ‘risk phenotypes’ or ‘at risk’ groups.
   
• Identifying compensatory mechanisms associated to early stages of neurodegenerative diseases
   
• Systematically analyzing the influence of genetic, epigenetic and phenotypic variability underlying neurodegenerative diseases on disease progression.