Precision ALS at TRICALS Masterclass, Amsterdam, Feb 19th 2025
Precision ALS Meeting at the TRICALS Masterclass, Amsterdam February 19th 2025
Academic, clinical and industry stakeholders in Precision ALS gathered at the Novotel Amsterdam Schiphol Airport for a meeting on the research programme in conjunction with the annual TRICALS Masterclass.
The initial stage of the meeting involved the Principal Investigators (PI’s), members of the Scientific Board and some additional key staff members, and focused on key items such as governance structure, legal agreements and the potential for the accession of new sites. The second half of the morning was dedicated to updating the full group of stakeholders on the progress and status of each work package, and to discussing the potential next steps in various areas of the research programme.
The Masterclass itself started in the afternoon, with the PI’s and many industry delegates attending, while the remaining Precision ALS researchers split into two workshops aimed at progressing particular, specific ongoing areas of applied work on the Precision research programme.
The next in-person Precision ALS meeting will take place as a satellite meeting at the ENCALS Conference in Turin on June 3rd where further progress on the project will be discussed amongst stakeholders.
A short summary of the proceedings of each Amsterdam workshop follows below.
Work Package 7: Machine Learning Workshop
The Precision-ALS Machine Learning meet-up brought together researchers from the core Precision-ALS project and our European Partners, who presented some of their work and discussed key next steps in our leveraging of the Precision-ALS platform and project.
Presentations were given online and to a packed, in-person meeting room by a range of researchers, including our European partners in Utrecht and Sheffield, and two presentations from Ireland, with topics including advances in software for automated Time-to-Event analysis for ALS, as well as an assessment of the current state of our extant Precision-ALS data. Following the presentations a number of key topics, including steps towards the inclusion of imaging and other multimodal data within the Precision-ALS platform, and perspective dataset, were discussed. This topic was focused on extensively, with contributions highlighting the challenges around data volumes and standardization of data collection protocols, biomarkers included.
As a result of this workshop plans were made to focus the next steps on identifying a bank of multimodal biomarkers and sample data to be consumed by the Precision-ALS platform.
Cognition Workshop
One of the critical challenges to cross-country research collaboration is that different countries use different research protocols. This is particularly the case when it comes to the measurement of cognitive and behavioural aspects of ALS.
In this workshop, we discussed the specific protocol differences between sites, how to determine the optimal method in defining impairments, and the steps that need to be taken to harmonize our procedures. In the near future we aim to gather control cognitive data across sites and to apply a consistent method of defining impairment, enabling more valid collaborative research.