The artificial intelligence algorithm research project developed over the past five years at the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center (BBRC), a research center of the Pasqual Maragall Foundation, has just yielded its first results: the creation of the spin-off BetaScreen. It is a technology company specialized in the exploitation of machine learning algorithms that predict the abnormality of Alzheimer's biomarkers from brain magnetic resonances.
The company, jointly promoted with researchers and doctors Juan Domingo Gispert and José Luis Molinuevo, has received co-financing from EIT Digital ---European Institute of Innovation and Technology, supported by the European Commission---, which allocated 243,000 euros for its development, and Criteria Venture Capital. In addition, in 2019, the La Caixa Foundation granted financial aid of 50,000 euros to the project through CaixaResearch Validate, with the collaboration of Caixa Capital Risc. The project also has the collaboration of Genesis Biomed, as a business partner, and GE Healthcare, as a technological partner.
With BetaScreen, a family of machine learning algorithms has been developed that can predict the abnormality of the core Alzheimer's disease biomarkers from a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan of the brain. This significantly reduces the costs of recruiting cognitively unaffected individuals for clinical trials and, therefore, identifies individual risk factors and carries out a personalized prevention plan, explains Dr. Juan Domingo Gispert, head of the Neuroimaging research group at BBRC. Thus, from the creation of BetaScreen, "an average saving of 15 million euros per clinical trial in the prevention of Alzheimer's will be generated", adds Dr. Gispert.
The project also has the collaboration of Genesis Biomed, as a business partner, and GE Healthcare, as a technological partnerThe Pasqual Maragall Foundation, directed by Arcadi Navarro, also director of the BBRC, warns that every three seconds a new case of dementia is diagnosed in the world, and it is estimated that currently 50 million people suffer from it, in most cases due to Alzheimer's. This figure translates in Spain to more than 900,000 affected individuals.
BetaScreen will be able to apply its methodology to magnetic resonances ----obligatory in any initial screening of a clinical trial--- performed on people participating in clinical trials for Alzheimer's, a disease that presents a preclinical phase of up to 20 years before the manifestation of the first symptoms. It is precisely during this phase that cognitively healthy people can present an anomalous accumulation of the beta-amyloid protein in the brain, whose presence exponentially increases the risk of suffering from Alzheimer's.
Currently, the identification of the beta-amyloid protein is complex, since the techniques used ---lumbar puncture and positron emission tomography (PET)--- are invasive and costly.