A country-wide trial aiming to revolutionise how dementia is diagnosed using blood tests is now underway.
The READ-OUT research team at Dementias Platform UK (DPUK) based at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge, is part of the Blood Biomarker Challenge – a multi-million pound programme supported by Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer’s Research UK, National Institute for Health and Care Research, Gates Ventures and players of People’s Postcode Lottery.
The Blood Biomarker Challenge research teams will build on recent breakthroughs in dementia blood tests, generating the evidence needed for them to be used in the NHS to improve diagnosis of dementia.
The READ-OUT team, led by Professor Vanessa Raymont, Professor James Rowe and Dr Ivan Koychev with Dementias Platform UK researchers from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge has welcomed its first participants into the study, at the Oxford Health’s NHS Foundation Trust’s Warneford Hospital in Oxford.
The team will assess multiple new and existing blood tests, looking at a range of dementia types including Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies. The researchers will also look at whether the blood tests can help detect these diseases at various stages and if the results need to be interpreted differently in people from different ethnic backgrounds or with other health conditions such as kidney disease.
They will recruit more than 3,100 people from 28 DPUK sites across all four nations at NHS memory clinics and community buses across the UK to sign up to the study, which will then feed into a clinical trial to assess if a panel of blood tests add benefit to the current NHS memory clinic pathway.
The second team in the Blood Biomarker Challenge is being led by Professor Jonathan Schott and Dr Ashvini Keshavan at University College London. The ADAPT team will focus on the most promising biomarker for Alzheimer’s disease, p-tau217. The researchers will carry out a clinical trial to see whether measuring p-tau217 in the blood increases the rate of diagnosis for Alzheimer’s disease both in people with early dementia, but also in those with mild, progressive problems with memory. The ADAPT team expect to admit their first participants onto their trial in the coming months.
These complementary research approaches will maximise the chances of providing the evidence needed to prove that blood tests are ready for use in the NHS. They will pave the way for them to be made available to all who might benefit within the next five years.
