Hello Ariane, thanks for talking to us today! Tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in the AMYPAD project.
Like many people, when I was younger, I was a bit lost and not sure what direction I wanted my career to go in. I began working at Brainomix – a startup at the time – for my Masters internship. The internship was focused on applying deep learning models to neuroimaging data to detect and segment intracranial haemorrhages in stroke patients. I found that really cool, it was really fascinating to see what could be done with such technologies, and the team helped spark my interest in brain imaging.
I came across the offer for the AMYPAD PhD project which was also on neuroimaging data but focused on Alzheimer’s disease. There seemed to be an interesting mix of people on the team, between academia, people that were more technical, clinicians and then the industry component. I thought that was a bonus, to have the opportunity early on during my PhD to work with a diverse group and see what research could mean from various perspectives.
What was the AMYPAD project trying to achieve?
AMYPAD aimed to improve our understanding and management of Alzheimer’s disease using amyloid PET imaging. Amyloid refers to abnormal protein build‑ups in the brain that are closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease. With PET imaging, these protein deposits can be visualised by injecting a small amount of a radioactive tracer that binds to amyloid, allowing clinicians and researchers to see how much amyloid has accumulated. One of our key projects was to explore how a quantitative scale, the Centiloid, could be used to compare amyloid PET scans and assess the degree of pathology present.
There are three tracers commonly used to assess amyloid levels in a PET scan and they all give you measurements on a slightly different scale. How the images are analysed also matters. If you have one typical measurement from one tracer done in one centre, you can’t easily compare it to a measurement taken from another tracer at another centre.
The goal of the Centiloid scale was to harmonise the PET imaging information using a scale anchored at 0 and 100. We’ve done a lot of work to understand what 0 means, what’s 10, what’s 30, what’s 40 etc. These values are important to be able to assess in a harmonised way how effective the drugs are in clinical trials, and the Centiloid scale is also very useful for clinicians talking to a patient and explaining to them what their scan means, because it goes beyond simply whether the scan is amyloid positive or amyloid negative.
The AMYPAD data set of >1500 amyloid PET scans collected, curated and processed over six years is now available to the research community.
What was your role as part of AMYPAD?
During my PhD in AMYPAD, I focused on how you can better track changes in amyloid over time, to make sure the methodology is robust and to understand what could be considered normal ageing and what could constitute abnormal amounts of change in amyloid deposition.
There are a lot of factors of variability to consider when you do one PET scan, there are biological factors but also technical factors such as what scanner is being used, what image reconstruction algorithms are being used, how is the image processed and so on.
As well as that, I was also working on how the Centiloid scale could be used for assessing and interpreting the degree of amyloid pathology. Both those pieces of work were helpful in preparation of the biomarker qualification opinion submission to the European Medicines Agency.
Where are you working now?
I work in industry now for GE HealthCare, but I also have an honorary research position at University College London. It's nice because I can combine applied research at GE HealthCare with more exploratory projects through academic collaborations.
I went into industry right after my PhD which doesn’t seem to be that common. I think that was because I was already involved in a public-private partnership and so I knew a bit about working with industry already.
How did the public-private partnership help your career to progress?
I went into industry right after my PhD which doesn’t seem to be that common. I think that was because I was already involved in a public-private partnership and so I knew a bit about working with industry already. During AMYPAD I was able to learn about how to interact with different stakeholders, whether that means academic partners, industry partners or regulatory agencies. It’s also quite valuable when you apply for a job to already have a bit of experience with regulatory processes in particular.
You mentioned experience with regulatory processes – AMYPAD received a biomarker qualification opinion from the EMA and you were a key contributor to that. Can you tell us about that and how did that affect your career progression?
I was one of the contributors but this was a substantial team effort!
When I started my PhD, I had no clue what the regulatory aspect entailed. It was helpful to understand what requirements the EMA and the FDA had and it gave me some insights into the level of evidence that you need to have. It also gave me confidence in the products that are already approved and on the market.
If I had not been involved in any way with industry or with regulatory processes, I think I wouldn’t have realised the scale or the difficulty of bringing change into the medical system. It’s quite striking. When you see everything that needs to happen from a regulatory perspective, it puts things into perspective. For me, it highlighted the need to have both components. As critical as academic research is, it also makes you understand the value of the industrial side to the global medical field.
Can you give us one example of the differences between academia and industry when conducting research?
One example is for instance the way you acquire an amyloid PET scan. In an academic research setting, you could consider performing very long scans, putting a patient in a scanner for one to two hours. You can get better and more accurate information from that scan, but it’s not really very convenient, because people don’t typically have an hour and half to spend in a scanner for that specific purpose, and it’s also not cost-efficient. In industry, although it depends on the research question, we tend to analyse static amyloid PET scans which take 10 to 20 minutes.
I think that academia is essential for really deep methodological innovation, exploring new approaches and pushing the boundaries of knowledge. Whereas industry focuses on clinical utility, things that are scalable and anything that has a very direct impact on patients. There are a lot of crossovers of course, these are not exclusive, and the most impactful progress can happen in spaces like public-private partnerships.
How did the academic side of the partnership benefit you as a researcher in your career?
The academic side is absolutely essential, and I would say it was fundamental to my development as a researcher. Academics push a bit more for publications, which are necessary for someone who wants to pursue an academic career, or possibly wants to return to academia after spending some time in a company. The strength of the PPP is that it does open both avenues, and makes you appreciate the differences but also the commonalities, shared interests and values of both worlds.
Your PhD also included some time working in Amsterdam. How did you find that experience?
I started my PhD and about six months later COVID hit, so I was in my room working in London initially and it could be quite lonely. Later I got the chance to spend a few months in Amsterdam, where were a lot of PhD students and post-docs who were working on AMYPAD and on other neuroimaging projects.
It was important to me to have people to interact with in person that I could more closely relate to, and it was overall just enjoyable to have that day-to-day contact after COVID. We would have casual conversations and get excited by new ideas and test things. When it’s more informal, it’s the most fun. And sometimes it’s the most productive.
Today is the International Day of Women and Girls In Science. Do you have any advice for young women considering doing a PhD as part of a public-private partnership?
It’s difficult to give advice that is applicable to everybody, but if science is something that interests you, don’t hesitate, go for it. Don’t assume that you need to be perfect or that you need to have all the answers – nobody has them! And you don’t need to tick all the boxes to be good enough.
You said you have a book to recommend for young female researchers?
Yes, someone recently recommended a great book to me, and I’m happy to have the chance to pass it along. It is called “The Elements of Marie Curie” by Dava Sobel, it’s a really engaging book and it’s beautifully written. It’s about how Marie Curie was often presented as one exceptional female scientist. The book highlights how she built a network of young scientists that were not so well known but were also pioneers in their fields in their own way. She mentored these women and brought them to a place where they were really good scientists themselves. The book emphasises the achievements of a network of women rather than putting one woman on a pedestal, and demonstrates that scientific excellence and inclusion are not mutually exclusive but reinforce each other.
AMYPAD was supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a partnership between the European Union and the European pharmaceutical industry.