Creating Tomorrow’s World Webinar highlights Transformative AI-driven Healthcare from Research, Industry and Clinical Perspectives

The ADAPT webinar series, Creating Tomorrow’s World, continued this month with a focus on PrecisionALS (PALS), a ground-breaking new academic, clinical and industry research programme that will provide new insights into our understanding of Motor Neuron Disease (MND), also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). This month’s webinar was moderated by ADAPT Executive Director Declan McKibben who is responsible for research collaborations with industry. The webinar also featured the following expert speakers…

• Professor Orla Hardiman, Director of the PrecisionALS research programme and Professor of Neurology at TCD. She is also the Co-Chair of both ENCALS and TRICALS, is Editor in Chief of the journal Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and the Frontotemporal Degenerations, and has received a number of awards for her work in this area.
• Dr. Robert Ross, Senior Lecturer at TU Dublin and Funded Investigator at ADAPT, who joined the conversation to give insight into a data-driven perspective of precision medicine on a programme like PrecisionALS.
• Dr. Bronagh Hayden, Medical Lead and Associate Director at Biogen Ireland. Dr. Hayden combines cutting-edge science and medicine to discover, develop and deliver innovative therapies for people living with serious neurological and neurodegenerative diseases.

Declan McKibben kicked off the webinar with an introduction to the PALS research programme as well as an introduction to our expert speakers. Professor Orla Hardiman, PALS Director, discussed this exciting new project in depth emphasizing the overall vision of the PALS project to “provide a data-driven precision medicine based approach towards new drug development by combining applied clinical research with cutting edge data science”. Prof. Hardiman highlighted the importance of a data-driven approach when researching a rare disease such as ALS as it helps identify mechanisms of disease and the patients for whom these new drug developments will be most effective.

Dr. Robert Ross of TU Dublin and ADAPT, continued the webinar by providing an insight into the data-driven perspective of precision medicine on a programme like PALS. He delves into the goals and challenges of this project, including how the team will be mitigating these challenges. Dr. Bronagh Hayden of Biogen, provided an enlightening perspective on the industry interests in this research programme. In particular, Dr. Hayden highlights the benefits, from a company perspective, of partnering with these projects in terms of the level of information that can be gained on rare diseases which will help form drug development among other benefits discussed in her presentation.

For the full discussion, watch the recording on ADAPT Youtube here. Stay updated about other webinars in this series by subscribing to our e-zine here.