AETIONOMY – Organising Knowledge about Neurodegenerative Disease Mechanisms for the Improvement of Drug Development and Therapy

The 5-year-project is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a joint undertaking between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association EFPIA. AETIONOMY aims at a new “mechanism-based taxonomy” disease classification systems, based upon the knowledge about the biological pathways involved in the aetiology of a disease to guide the classification of disease classes and subclasses. Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease will be in the focus of the project. 

The AETIONOMY project will involve the collection of all available data including clinical data, imaging and genetic data and will create a new way to combine all the data together to look for patterns which could identify sub-groups of patients with similar causes of their disease. It will include a Clinical Study, which aims at a validation of the “mechanism-based taxonomy” generated in the course of the first years. 

AETIONOMY is a collaboration of 17 partners across 11 countries. IRI is the legal partner in the project and will be responsible for Ethical and Legal Governance.