April 16, 2024
On April 4, the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ) announced that they would renew funding for the Stop-AD Centre, led by Drs. Villeneuve and Poirier. This funding comes as a part of the Programmation de recherche intersectorielle sur le vieillissement, and ensures support for Stop-AD for the next four years, from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2028.
The renewal of FRQ funding will enable the Stop-AD Centre to continue its mission of accelerating discoveries in Alzheimer’s disease prevention. The program is directed by Sylvia Villeneuve (principal investigator) and Judes Poirier (co-principal investigator).
Stop-AD is the product of a rich collaboration with, counting among its listed co-investigators, Drs. Nathan Spreng, Maiya Geddes, Mallar Chakravarty, Charles Ramassamy, André-Ann Baril, Thang Dang-Vu, Claudine Gauthier, Maxime Descoteaux, Christian Bocti, Robert Laforce, as well as numerous national and international collaborators.
Stop-AD’s main resource of the is the PREVENT-AD cohort (Pre-symptomatic Evaluation of Experimental or Novel Treatments for AD), which includes people aged 55 and over who are initially in good cognitive health and have a family history of AD-type dementia. These “at-risk” participants undergo detailed cognitive follow-up and holistic assessment (multimodal brain imaging, lumbar punctures, lifestyle examination, etc.) on an annual basis, most of them for more than 10 years.
The ultimate aim of the work at the StoP-Alzheimer Center is to monitor the silent onset of the disease in real time, several years before the first symptoms appear in a population at risk of developing it. The researchers’ aim is to better understand and detect the early onset of the disease.
Their specific objectives are to:
- Develop biomarkers to identify people in the pre-clinical phase of AD
- Assess the genetic, environmental, psychological and social factors associated with the development of neurocognitive disorders and their rate of progression
- Test promising new pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions aimed at delaying the onset of AD
- Make our longitudinal research data easy to find, accessible and reusable for the whole scientific community via the principles of open science in order to accelerate discoveries on the pre-clinical phase of AD
Congratulations Drs. Villeneuve et Poirier!