The CoSTREAM project successfully concluded on May 31, 2021.
Following a start in December 2015, CoSTREAM has investigated the link between stroke and Alzheimer's disease over the course of 66 months. Eleven partners from seven countries combined clinical and preclinical research teams to improve the understanding of the pathways that drive the co-occurrence of stroke and Alzheimer's Disease.
The consortium developed a high-throughput platform to characterize common mechanisms, also for potential intervention. We hope that the increased knowledge of common mechanisms between both diseases will ultimately lead to less co-morbidity for patients, development of novel evidence-based intervention, better preventive strategies in clinical and public health care, and increased health at an individual as well as societal level.
CoSTREAM filled the urgent need for novel biomarkers, both blood-based and imaging, that aid in the identification of patients with pathology that can be halted to prevent or delay disease. This leads to new directions for clinical research for disease prevention, health promotion, therapy development, and management of comorbidities.
We are also happy to report that we successfully developed an organ-on-a-chip model for the neurovascular unit, thereby providing an essential tool for the in vitro characterization of pathways underlying both diseases and providing revolutionary opportunities for research on therapeutics.
Our research results have been published in over 135 peer-reviewed scientific papers, with additional papers currently in preparation or available as pre-print non-reviewed publications. Links to these publications are available on this website.