PRISM

The PRISM project (Psychiatric Ratings using Intermediate Stratified Markers) is an EU-funded project involving 23 partners from 8 European countries. From Amsterdam, the Alzheimer Center (Jolande Pijnenburg, Pieter-Jelle Visser and Lianne Reus) and the department of psychiatry of Amsterdam UMC/VUmc are involved.

The PRISM project aims to develop a quantitative biological approach to the understanding of neuropsychiatric diseases, in order to revitalise the discovery and development of more effective treatments for patients. The project will focus on schizophrenia (SZ), Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and major depression (MD), disorders that share in part common symptomatology’s, including social withdrawal and certain cognitive deficits, such as attention, working memory and sensory processing.

Innovative technologies (e.g. EEG, cognitive tasks, (f)MRI, smartphone monitoring, genetics and epigenetics) will be used to deep phenotype a clinical cohort of SZ and AD patients. These data will then be combined with existing clinical data sets from major European and global disease cohorts that also include MD. The aim will be to derive a set of quantifiable biological parameters from these data that allow to cluster and differentiate SZ, AD and MD patients who are, or are not, socially withdrawn.

Contact information:

Moji Aghajani (postdoctoral researcher), Ilja Saris or Lianne Reus (PhD students)

email: prism@vumc.nl 

T: 06 – 83 86 33 20