The high-level, overarching scientific board was formed by leaders of Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) neurodegeneration projects and was chaired by Carlos Dìaz. The Scientific Coordination Board was responsible for decision making regarding overall scientific strategy, creation of Working Groups and Task Forces, assessment, and recommendations on prioritisation and resourcing of synergies. The Scientific Coordination Board met at least once per semester. As the funding period of Neuronet has reached its end in August 2022, the profiles of the members of the Scientific Coordination Board may become out-of-date.

Scientific Coordination Board, Carlos Diaz, Hugh Marston, George Tofaris, Mercè Boada, Pieter Jelle Visser, Darrel Pemberton, Craig Ritchie, Andreas Ebneth, Malcolm Macleod, Margot Bakker — Scientific Coordination Board from left to right; Carlos Diaz, Hugh Marston, George Tofaris, Mercè Boada, Pieter Jelle Visser, Darrel Pemberton, Craig Ritchie, Andreas Ebneth, Malcolm Macleod, Margot Bakker

Members

Dag Aarsland, PD-MIND & RADAR-AD representative

Dag Aarsland, MD, is Professor and Head of Department of Old Age Psychiatry, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, and Research Director at the Centre for Age-Related Medicine, Stavanger University Hospital.

As a psychiatrist he has worked as a senior consultant in geriatric psychiatry for most of his career. His main research interest is the neuropsychiatric aspects of patients with neurodegenerative diseases, in particular translational studies on cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.

He is PI of European DLB Consortium, member of the Scientific board of LBDA, Member of International DLB Consortium, PI of the Western Norwegian Dementia study and the Prodromal LBD study. He has published more than 400 papers in DLB and related areas, including clinical trials, cohort studies, and a wide range of biomarkers including imaging, CSF and EEG.

Mercè Boada Rovira, MOPEAD representative

Prof. Mercè Boada Rovira, MD, PhD is Neurologist (Universitat de Barcelona, 1972). PhD in 1993. Founder and medical director of Fundació ACE 1995. Distinguish professor of Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. Former President of the Catalan Society of Neurology (2000-2002).

Research Interest: Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, including diagnosis, pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic treatment and basic, social, bioethical and legal research applied to the welfare and protection of people suffering dementia and their caregivers.

From 1996 to 2001, advisor on the bioethics committee of the Catalan Government, technical coordinator for the design of care model for people with cognitive impairment, and President of the committee for the Pharmacological Treatment for Alzheimer’s disease of the Catalan Government (CATMA).

Co-director Documento Sitges 1st and 2nd edition. Member of the Executive Committee of the European Alzheimer’s Disease Consortium (EADC) and Member of European Institute of Womens Health (EIWH) Advisory Board. Leader of several projects funded by the Spanish and Catalan Governments, European Union and private institutions: AES, H2020, EFSD, ERA-NET, IMI2, Fundació La Caixa, and Grifols.

To date, leader of more than 110 clinical trials as well as authorship of more than 220 articles, 36 book chapters and 12 books of medical outreach.

Among other awards, recipient of the Professional Excellence Award by the Medical Council of Catalonia (2008); the Josep Trueta Medal for Health Merit, from the Generalitat de Catalunya (2012); the highest honor conferred by the Catalan Government, the “Creu de Sant Jordi” (St. George’s Cross) for her work in the field of Alzheimer’s disease (2014), and Honorable Member of the Spanish Society of Neurology.

Andreas Ebneth, PHAGO representative

Andreas Ebneth, Scientific Director in the Neuroscience Therapeutic Area at Janssen Pharmaceutica NV, holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the University Hospital in Hannover in 1994 in the field of biophysics of proto-oncogenes. He joined the Max Planck unit in Hamburg, Germany, as a Postdoc studying the role of tau in Alzheimer’s disease. His research focused on the regulation of intracellular, microtubule-dependent transport mechanism.

After his Postdoc period, he worked in a biotech company in the field of ion channels & cardiovascular safety. Thereafter Andreas was employed by Evotec in Hamburg, Germany, and involved in multiple projects partnered with pharma industry in the area of neurodegeneration (primarily Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease).

Currently Andreas leads a team in Beerse, Belgium, working on small molecule and biologics approaches to identify therapies aiming at reducing pathology in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. In addition, he is Project leader in European-wide collaborations within the IMI framework addressing iPSC technology and neuroimmunology aspects in Alzheimer’s disease.

Gill Farrar, AMYPAD representative

Gill Farrar is Global Medical Leader – Neurology for GE HealthCare. She is a biologist by background and has been involved in GE’s amyloid imaging work for over 15 years. Gill conducts research in neurology and clinical trials and leads on EFPIA’s activities on the AMYPAD project. The AMYPAD project examines the potential of amyloid PET scanning in improving the diagnostic work-up of people suspected to have Alzheimer’s disease, as well as understanding the natural history of the disease in a pre-symptomatic stage.

Martin Hofmann-Apitius, AETIONOMY representative

Martin Hofmann-Apitius holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and worked in experimental molecular biology as well as in theoretical / computational biology.

Martin Hofmann-Apitius has experience in both, academic research and industrial research. In fact, he moved back and forth between academia and industry three times in his life. Since 2002 he is leading the Department of Bioinformatics at the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) in Sankt Augustin (Germany), a governmental not-for-profit, applied research institute. In July 2006 he has been appointed as a Professor for Applied Life Science Informatics at Bonn-Aachen International Center for Information Technology (B-IT).

Martin Hofmann-Apitius is (co-) author of more than 150 scientific publications.

Martin Hofmann-Apitius is the academic initiator and co-coordinator of IMI-project AETIONOMY, a project aimed at generating a mechanism-based taxonomy of neurodegenerative diseases (see www.aetionomy.eu. He is also involved in three other, related IMI projects dealing with aspects of neurodegenerative disease research: EPAD (http://ep-ad.org), PHAGO (https://www.phago.eu) and RADAR-AD (https://www.radar-ad.org).

As a very important element of integration of Alzheimer research in Europe, Martin Hofmann-Apitius is a major contributor and Work Package Leader in VirtualBrainCloud (website yet to be publicly released), a large H2020 project that bridges between the world of IMI and the Human Brain Project.

His current research activities in the field of neurodegenerative diseases focus on:

Integrative data semantics, unstructured information mining and information extraction
- Generation of terminologies and ontologies representing essential terms and concepts of the neurodegeneration knowledge domain
- Design of scalable solutions for text mining in the scientific literature and real world data (such as EHRs) in the neurodegeneration domain
- Large-scale information extraction for knowledge-based modeling of neurodegenerative diseases
Mechanistic modelling of neurodegenerative diseases and psychiatric conditions
- Development of “text-2-BEL” services
- Large-scale production of mechanistic models for Alzheimer and other neurodegenerative diseases using OpenBEL, a dedicated syntax for knowledge-based models
- Implementation of NeuroMMSig, a mechanism-enrichment server for AD, PD, and epilepsy
- Implementation (in the near future) of PsychoMMSig, a dedicated enrichment server for psychiatric conditions
Development of compute infrastructures (including FAIR data- and knowledge-management) supporting neurodegeneration research
- Implementation of semantic core services for neurodegeneration research based on a modified version of OLS, the ontology lookup service developed at EBI
- Implementation of a graph database that integrates seamlessly mechanistic OpenBEL models, public and proprietary databases, and modeling and mining workflows (for the PHAGO project)
- Development of a multimodal viewer for neurodegeneration research: semantic integration in a GUI of terminologies and ontologies, text mining services, data services (e.g. data catalogues), knowledge-based models, NeuroMMSig, and longitudinal biomarker progression models of Alzheimer´s disease
Longitudinal disease progression models and simulation using Virtual Patient Cohorts
- Starting the “disease-progression-modeling” initiative in the neurodegenerative disease domain (see www.diseaseprogressionmodels.eu).
- Initiated comparative progression modelling across all major AD longitudinal data sets worldwide.

Matthew Hotopf, RADAR-CNS representative

Professor Matthew Hotopf CBE FRCPsych FMedSci, is Vice Dean of Research at the Institute of Psychiatry Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, and Director of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Centre.

He trained in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and in Psychiatry at the Maudsley. His main area of research is in the grey area between medicine and psychiatry, exploring the interaction between mental and physical health, and uses “big data” approaches to understand this interface better.

He has worked extensively in areas where mental health relates to other walks of life – including occupational and military health, mental health law, and the wider community.

He has received many research grants, including the Innovative Medicines Initiative RADAR-CNS (Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse in CNS disorders) program, which seeks to use data streams from smartphones and wearables to assess and predict health states in people with epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and depression. He works clinically as a liaison psychiatrist at King’s College Hospital and St Christopher’s Hospice, and leads the award-winning IMPARTS (Integrating mental and physical health, Research training and Service) project which seeks to provide better mental healthcare to people with physical illnesses. He received the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine’s 2016 Wayne Katon Research Award, is a National Institute of Health Research Senior Investigator and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s 2018 Birthday Honours for services to psychiatric research.

Dominique Lesuisse, IM2PACT representative

Dominique Lesuisse is the Head of the Tissue Barriers Research group in the Rare and Neurologic Diseases Research Therapeutic Area at Sanofi, Inc., based in Chilly Mazarin, France.

Dominique received a B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Louvain, Belgium in the lab of Léon Ghosez. She then spent 2 years at the University of Irvine, California in Larry Overman’s lab, followed by 2 years at MIT in Glenn Berchtold’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. In 1987, Dominique joined Roussel-Uclaf, a French pharmaceutical company which evolved into Sanofi, where over the years she managed many medicinal chemistry projects and departments.

She and her teams have brought 14 drug candidates to development, and one is on the market.

Dominique’s research interests include medicinal chemistry and drug design and in particular blood brain barrier biology, with a focus on mechanisms to enhance the brain exposure of biologic therapeutics. She and her team have developed an innovative platform to enhance receptor mediated transcytosis of antibodies and other cargos.

Dominique has published more than 40 articles and book chapters, and holds 36 patents. She is member of several editorial boards, and currently serves as the Vice President of the French Therapeutic Chemistry Society. Among other recognitions, in 2017, Dominique was honored by the French Chemistry Society for her work in drug discovery and development.

Raj Long, EPND representative

An established multilingual senior executive with over 25 years of demonstrated success in regulatory, clinical development and accelerating access. Raj Long has considerable experience as a senior international regulatory executive in the pharmaceutical industry, combined with strategic experience as an advisor to the Department of Health & Social Care, European Union, Gates Foundation and World Health Organisation (WHO). Raj is currently a Deputy Director for safety and pharmacovigilance at the Gates Foundation and also supports the WHO COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing taskforce.

Prior to that, Raj was Consultant Advisor to the Chief Scientist of the WHO, as well as being a WHO co-lead on the COVAX Task Force on COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing and supporting other WHO committees, Vice Chair of the World Dementia Council and has provided advice to numerous expert groups and government initiatives such as the G7 Global Action Against Dementia initiative and the Accelerated Access Review with NHS England. In her executive career, Raj held very senior international regulatory roles with responsibility for licensing innovative medicines in global pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol Myers Squibb, Novartis and GE Healthcare. In 2020 TOPRA ( Organisation for Regulatory Professionals) awarded Raj with the Lifetime Achievement Award. Additionally, in in 2021, the UK Government appointed Raj to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency Board (MHRA) as a Non-Executive Director.

Malcolm Macleod, EQIPD representative

Malcolm Macleod is Professor in Neurology and Translational Neuroscience at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh. After training in Internal Medicine his PhD concerned the neuroprotective actions of FK506 and post-doctoral work in the Seckl lab defined a neuroprotective role for increased expression of the mineralocorticoid receptor.

During a pivotal sabbatical year with Donnan at the National Stroke Research Institute in Melbourne he began an involvement with stroke clinical trials, and it was in an effort to identify suitable drugs for such clinical trials that he began to develop techniques to allow the systematic review and meta-analysis of data from animal studies.

In 2004 he founded, with Howells, the Collaborative Approach to Meta-analysis and Review of Animal Data from Experimental Studies (CAMARADES, www.camarades.info).

This approach has proved fruitful both in highlighting problems with in vivo research and in providing evidence for clinical trial design.

He was an author in the Lancet series on increasing value and reducing waste in biomedical research, and current work focusses on developing and evaluating strategies for research improvement. He is a member of the UK Commission for Human Medicines and the European Medicines Agency Scientific Advisory Group for Neurology. More recently he is a member of the recently formed UK Reproducibility Network; and Academic Coordinator of the European Quality In Preclinical Data (EQIPD) Innovative Medicines Initiative project. He chairs the Program Committee for the 2020 REWARD-EQUATOR conference hosted by QUEST Centre Berlin.

Walter Maetzler, IDEA-FAST representative

Walter Maetzler is full professor for neurogeriatrics and deputy director of the neurology department of the University Hospital in Kiel, Germany. His main clinical interest is on old and geriatric persons, especially with Parkinson’s disease and other disorders associated with functionally relevant movement and cognitive disabilities. He leads a research group focusing on the analysis and validation of mobile sensor technology in supervised (“lab- or clinic-based”) and unsupervised (“home-based”) assessments. He is involved as principal investigator, chief clinical investigator and workpackage leader in multiple international projects investigating the potential of mobile sensor technology to improve our understanding of disease progression and treatment response in Parkinson’s disease. Examples at a European level are IDEA-FAST, Mobilise-D, Keep Control and Fair-Park II. Currently, he serves as the co-chair of the Technology task force of the Movement Disorders Society and as an advisory board member of the Critical Path for Parkinson’s (CPP) Consortium.

Hugh Marston, PRISM & PRISM 2 representative

Hugh Marston PhD, FRSB, is Senior Vice President, Head of Global CNS Diseases at Boehringer Ingelheim.

Prior to this position he used to work as senior research fellow at Lilly’s Erl Wood research site in Surrey, UK leading External Neurodegenerative Research in Europe. Erl Wood’s research focus covers novel approaches designed to modify neurodegeneration, chronic pain and effective neurosymptomatic intervention.

Having originally trained as a psychopharmacologist at Cambridge he has over 30 years’ experience in various forms of drug discovery research. Most recently as head of pharmacology at IOMet Pharma (pka TPP GD) a virtual pharma company acquired by Merck in 2016.

Prior to that he lead neuropharmacology teams at Merck, Schering-Plough and Organon working on projects principally in the psychiatry area from discovery through to launch.

As such he has had a long standing interest in transforming our ability to translate science to and from the clinic across the neuroscience disciplines. As part of his role at Lilly he is Project Leader of the IMI2 PRISM initiative an industry/academe EU funded consortium that is seeking to find translatable, quantitative biological phenotypes in CNS disorders. He maintains an active interest in academic research through collaboration and an honorary professorship at the University of St Andrews with 70+ peer reviewed publications and five granted patents.

Jochen Prehn, PD-MitoQUANT representative

Jochen Prehn heads up a large, highly skilled and motivated research team at the interface of biomedical and translational systems biology research and focusing on neuroscience, (neuro)oncology and metabolic disorders at the CSM (www.systemsmedicineireland.ie) RCSI.

He was the first recipient of the Science Foundation Ireland Research Professorship award in 2003 and is considered an international authority on the single-cell analysis and the molecular control of apoptosis, cell death and mitochondrial dysfunction.

Prof Prehn has successfully conducted research in these four areas with a particular emphasis on Bcl-2 family proteins and AMPK signalling.

A second major research interest lies in real-time imaging of cell death signals in neurons and cancer cells, employing confocal and in vivo imaging techniques. This research includes the development of computational approaches to understand and overcome apoptosis sensitivity and resistance and cellular bioenergetics at a systems rather than single entity level.

In collaboration with clinicians (pathology, medicine, and surgery), Prof Prehn translated these approaches into clinically relevant settings, and has initiated multiple large-scale, multi-partner clinical projects such as the PD-MitoQuant, RNA-NEURO, APO-COLON, APO-DECIDE clinical studies.

Craig Ritchie, EPAD representative

Craig Ritchie is the Professor of Psychiatry of Ageing at the University of Edinburgh and also Director of Edinburgh Dementia Prevention having moved from his role as Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Mental Health at Imperial College London in October 2014.

In 2016, Craig was appointed as Associate Director of the Edinburgh Clinic Research Facility (CRF) and elected Chair of the Scottish Dementia Research Consortium (SDRC) in 2017.

He has driven forward on his commitment to promote and grow that consortium to assist Scotland and Scottish Based Researchers from all over the world to achieve its objectives and theirs. His primary research interest is in the maintenance of brain health in mid-life to mitigate the risks of initiation and progression of degenerative brain diseases that may lead to dementia.

To achieve this he leads as Chief Investigator on the EPAD (European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia) Programme, the PREVENT Dementia Project and the Scottish Brain Health Register. Craig has recently been appointed as an Associate Director of DPUK2 (Dementias Platform UK).

Lynn Rochester, Mobilise-D representative

Lynn is Professor of Human Movement Science at Newcastle University. In 2018 she was appointed to a national role in the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network as Specialty Cluster Lead with strategic oversight of research delivery across portfolios in ageing, neurodegenerative disease, dementia, genetics and neurological disorders.

Lynn’s research interests focus on understanding and mitigating mobility loss in ageing and neurodegenerative disease and, conversely, what mobility can tell us about brain health. The use of digital technology is fundamental to this process and in helping to translate knowledge from the laboratory to the clinic.

To deliver these interests Lynn established and leads the Brain and Movement Research Group – comprised of a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, clinical scientists and clinical engineers with a research focus on age related gait and mobility disorders.

Lynn is the Co-ordinator of Mobilise-D aiming to develop and validate digital mobility biomarkers. She also holds an NIHR Senior Investigators award (2020-2024).

George Tofaris, IMPRiND representative

George Tofaris is an Associated Professor of Neurology and Consultant Neurologist at the University of Oxford. His research aim is to delineate cellular pathways in protein quality control that could inform the development of targeted therapies in neurodegenerative and neurogenetic disorders.

To this end, his group is currently employing forward genetics, proteomics and transcriptomics in models of increasing cellular complexity, including patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). He is the academic lead for the EU IMI Consortiu.m

IMPRiND which aims to identify new targets that are relevant to the progression of pathology in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. He graduated from the combined MD/PhD programme of Cambridge University and trained in Internal Medicine and Neurology in London teaching hospitals and Oxford.

He previously held a Lefler post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School. As a clinically active Consultant Neurologist at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, he covers acute Neurology and leads regional specialist clinics in Movement and Neurogenetic Disorders.

Pieter Jelle Visser, EMIF-AD representative

Dr Pieter Jelle Visser works at the Maastricht University and the VU University medical Center Amsterdam. He is a clinical epidemiologist who has coordinated large-scale European Alzheimer’s disease studies on early diagnosis and prognosis in which data harmonization was central (DESCRIPA, EDAR, BIOMARKAPD). Through Visser’s leadership MHeNS has a broad portfolio of studies integrating biomarker and health data including a 10-year follow-up of MCI subjects. Visser led data harmonisation for EMIF-AD and works on data harmonisation for EPAD.