PRISM at the 2018 ECNP Congress

Martien Kas, PRISM project co-ordinator, will present at the session on digital technology at the 31st ECNP Congress taking place on 6-9 October 2018 in Barcelona. His talk entitled “Passive remote behavioural monitoring in PRISM, an Innovative Medicine Initiative project” will introduce “BEHAPP”, a smartphone application aimed to provide longitudinal, objective, and quantitative measures for social withdrawal in patients suffering from depression, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer disease.

Two PRISM abstracts have been submitted for poster presentation at the congress: “Studying social withdrawal in group housed mice using semi-natural conditions”, by Kevin Ike; and “The PRISM clinical study: exploring biomarkers related to social withdrawal in patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease” by Amy Bilderbeck.

We are looking forward to seeing you in Barcelona!

Highlights of the Mainz Meeting

The complete consortium came together in March (8^th-9^th) for its annual General Assembly in Mainz, Germany.

In addition to the presentations from workpackage leaders on the project progress, junior and senior scientists presented posters on their PRISM- research findings. The presentations and posters covered a wide range of topics, including progress on the studies in European patient cohorts of schizophrenia (SZ), on genome-wide association studies to connect genetic to social withdrawal, on the ongoing recruitment and assessments in SZ and Alzheimer’s (AD) patients, on the “BEHAPP” app and its use in comparing the behaviour of SZ and AD patients, on the pre-clinical harmonisation of experimental approaches, on the establishment of an optimal task battery for cognitive testing, on the approval of ethics applications, and on the implementation of the rodent test battery (including protocols) and social interaction paradigm. 

The meeting was hosted by Boehringer Ingelheim.

Futility analysis status

An important milestone was achieved this month: the start of the futility analysis using the initial data sets from the clinical deep phenotyping study. This marks the beginning of an intensive phase of work to

P1vital plays a key role in leading the co-ordination of the futility data lock, partnering closely with SBGneuro (Maarten Mennes, and Christian Beckman) who will be performing the futility analysis itself.“We are also working with a group of data champions from the recruitment sites as well as Biotrial and other industry partners, each of whom have delegated responsibilities to lead on data exploration and endpoint generation before it is sent to SBGneuro for further processing, and who serve as knowledge leaders when there are key scientific questions to guide the futility analysis”, says Amy Bilderbeck from P1vital.

The futility analysis will provide certainty that the outcome of the overall study is not futile and strengthens the recommendation from the consortium to plan for a continuation from Phase 1 of the project.

PRISM project beyond Europe

Awareness of the project has once more reached attention at the international level with the project being promoted at the CINP Congress (International College of Neuropsychopharmacology) in Vienna on 16-19 June. The congress was attended by about 1,300 delegates from around the world. ECNP had a booth at the exhibition where delegates could interact and get informed about the PRISM project and other ECNP (European College of Neuropsychopharmacology) activities.

Last May the project was presented in North America with flyers being distributed at the ECNP booth at the APA’s Annual Meeting (American Psychiatry Association) on 5-9 May 2018 in New York, and at the SOBP’s 73rd Annual Meeting (Society of Biological Psychiatry) on 10-12 May 2018 in New York, USA. The two meetings together attracted around 16,000 participants from North America and around the world.

Join the PRISM LinkedIn group

The PRISM LinkedIn group is an open-access tool that has been created to connect team members, keep stakeholders up to date, and distribute news about the project. The group is open for members of the consortium as well as for other stakeholders whom have interest to follow and discuss topics related to the project.