The overarching aim of Neuro-SysMed is to develop new and/or improved treatments and treatment strategies. The Centre facilitates early access to such new therapies for patients across Norway through participation in national and international randomised clinical trials. Our ultimate goal is to lower the burden of disease.
We have established a comprehensive novel support framework to address the unmet treatment needs of Norwegian patients within the four diseases. In doing so, we are continuing to enable patients from all over Norway access to cutting-edge treatment trials and to develop precision medicine. More specifically, Neuro-SysMed continues to work towards:
- Discovering novel therapeutic targets by both nominating (in silico and in vitro screening) and testing new therapies in novel disease models
- Performing cutting-edge clinical trials (mainly investigator-initiated)
- Developing biomarkers for disease detection, patient stratification and ultimately precision medicine
- Enabling and applying advanced patient care by improving daily function and quality of life
- Introducing systems medicine into Norwegian neurology
Research plan and strategy
Neuro-SysMed clinical trials are at its core, with samples and data from the trials feeding the Centre’s translational research activities. Research goes across research groups and expertise, and involves large interdisciplinary efforts to achieve its goals.
Neuro-SysMed is organising and conducting randomised clinical treatment trials to evaluate the efficacy and safety of therapies, by novel or established drugs with new indications that may delay or even arrest disease progression, ameliorate symptoms or optimise care for affected individuals. While each study has its own scientific questions and efficacy endpoints, all projects running under the Centre contribute with data, such as clinical scorings, DNA and RNA data, blood and cerebrospinal fluid analyses, tissue sample analyses, and brain images, to a common Neuro-SysMed database. Using this database, the vast amount of information collected by the Centre is integrated to define biomarkers that enable early and precise diagnosis, to subgroup patients within each disease (stratification), and achieve accurate prognosis and tailored treatment choices for individual patients.
In terms of systems medicine, our Parkinson’s disease (PD) team is setting up the path for others to follow, with the ParkOme project having mapped molecular profiles from tissue samples from more than 1,300 brains of deceased patients with PD and other neurodegenerative diseases – the largest brain omics database for PD in the world. From this study, a new subtype of PD has been identified based on mitochondrial deficiency. Work to develop clinical biomarkers is ongoing in all four diseases. Several cell models have been developed and are being used to screen and discover new treatments. We are also well underway with our in-silico drug screening, based on the national Norwegian registries.
To better visualise the activities going across the numerous research groups involved in Neuro-SysMed, we have organised these into 9 research nodes.
Foto: Neuro-SysMed