EPND – European platform for neurodegenerative disorders

Project Acronym EPND
Funding Program IMI & EFPIA
Budget € 19,005,502.00
Coordinator PJ Visser (University of Maastricht) and Anthony Brookes (University of Leicester)
Website https://epnd.org/

About EPND

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are among the most common neurodegenerative conditions with an estimated economic burden in Europe of €9million in 2022. Treatments that can prevent the disease or modify disease progression are still lacking. One of the key barriers to the effective development of these treatments is an incomplete toolbox of biomarkers. 

The aim of the project is to integrate existing initiatives and build, grow and deliver a scalable and self-sustainable platform called the European Platform for Neurodegenerative Diseases (EPND) for storage and analysis of high quality clinical and biological samples and data collections. The overall objective of this project is to develop EPND as a European infrastructure facilitating access to biomarkers and data in order to accelerate biomarker discovery and validation and eventually support the development of therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases. 

The project’s interdisciplinary consortium consists of Key Opinion Leaders in the field of data and sample discovery, legal aspects of data sharing, sustainability, biomarker development, and neurodegenerative diseases. This will complement the industry consortium to provide the full array of stakeholders needed to fulfill the five objectives mentioned above.

EATRIS role in the project

EATRIS, in close cooperation with all partners, will lead the process of Sustainability and exploitation of the platform.  The process will be driven by a cross-WP inter-disciplinary team, ensuring each WP’s outputs of the project are amenable to efficient and user-centric future exploitation in the form of a sustainable platform offering. A plan of action outlining the route to final operations and sustainability, will be designed with an emphasis on a strong stakeholder engagement throughout, using an iterative ‘design, develop and disseminate’ process. This task will design scenarios for governance, business model, access mechanism, and operational structure together with defining a mechanism to make the model sustainable.


This project has received funding from the IMI 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No. 101034344. The IMI JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA.