Common mechanisms and pathways in Stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. (CoSTREAM)

Project summary

This project aims to improve our understanding of the co-occurrence of stroke and AD. An essential concept of our proposal is that stroke and AD are sequential diseases that have overlapping pathyphysiological mechanisms in addition to shared risk factors. We will particularly focus on these common mechanisms and disentangle when and how these mechanisms diverge into causing either stroke, or AD, or both. Another important concept is that mechanisms under study will not only include the known pathways of ischemic vasculopathy and CAA, but we will explore and unravel novel mechanisms linking stroke and AD. We will do so by exploiting our vast international network in order to link various big datasets and by incorporating novel analytical strategies with emerging technologies in the field of genomics, metabolomics, and brain MR-imaging

We will combine world-class clinical and preclinical research teams to improve the understanding of the pathways that drive the co-occurrence of stroke and Alzheimer’s Disease, and will develop a high-throughput platform to characterize these mechanisms to allow intervention targeted on the pathways. The increased knowledge of common mechanisms between both diseases will ultimately lead to less co-morbidity for patients, development of novel evidence-based intervention, better preventive strategies in clinical and public health care, and increased health at an individual as well as societal level.

CoSTREAM will provide a one-of-a-kind easy-to-use prediction toolbox to improving clinical prediction and risk assessment for both stroke and Alzheimer’s, and their co-occurence.

Finally, CoSTREAM will also develop an organ-on-a-chip model for the neurovascular unit, thereby providing an essential tool for the in vitro characterization of pathways underlying both diseases, as well as providing revolutionary opportunities for research on therapeutics.