About ADgut project

Overview

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia in the Western world. Until today, there is neither cure nor any preventive strategy on the horizon for this devastating neurodegenerative disorder. Our recent results strongly support a microbial involvement in the development of AD and show how gut microbiome modulation can slow down or halt the onset of AD. This discovery represents a substantial paradigm shift for the etiology of AD. We will therefore target the gut and its microbiota in view of a novel diagnosis. The gut modulation initiated by the encapsulated probiotics will cause a delay of AD-onset, i.e. prevention and pave the way to a novel therapy for Alheimer’s disease.

Goals

The groundbreaking goal of this research project is to establish a novel therapeutic strategy or approach for the delay and ultimately a disease-modifying therapy for AD. A successful accomplishment of this project will allow the use of novel encapsulated probiotic cocktails for the prevention and therapy of AD, to derive AD risk factors and to establish an objective baseline setting for AD diagnosis. Based on a fast metagenomic reader concept, an opening of new horizons in biomedical diagnostics and personalized medicine through the marketing of these technologies and therapeutic concepts may become true.

Based on our preclinical results, we strongly believe that AD-gut will lay a novel foundation for:

•  An improved assessment of AD risk,
•  Bearing the potential of an AD screening and diagnosis test, and,
•  Providing therapeutic options for AD patients.

The AD-gut project is conceived as a “window into the brain-gut connection” and perfectly matches the P4 MedicineTM paradigm. Therefore, it seeks to devise metagenomic-based diagnostics and probiotic encapsulation schemes aligned to the P4 MedicineTM objectives:

Predictive – the microbiome signature promises to be an early indicator for various diseases. This feature will be used to establish an AD-risk factor and an indicator for starting a preventive probiotic based treatment.

Preventive – If we fully exploit the microbiome signatures, early and differential diagnosis will become available and will enrich the medical instrumentation and therapies. This represents an untapped potential for innovative, non-invasive diagnosis and AD preventive treatments.

Personalized – The microbiome is as rich and as individual as the human genome. There will be no “one drug fits all” solution. Instead, a tight link between a quantitative assessment of the bacteria population and a personalized well-adapted probiotic treatment promises to lead to a beneficial outcome for the patients.

„Go to business“ initiative:

• Encapsulation of probiotic cocktails will be prepared up to a readiness level for clinical testing in cooperation with European pharma or food industry.
• The DNA-mapping concept will be translated into a start-up company at the latest two years after the launch of AD-gut. The Leuven and Lausanne teams have presently a broad patent portfolio ensuring a „Freedom of operation“ for initiating a start-up.
• Ultimately, „Go to business“ is a core intention and will be regularly evaluated in close cooperation with industry or in view of an appropriate start-up launch.