EPAD Consortium LCS vIMI Biosamples Dataset
The European Prevention of Alzheimer's Dementia (EPAD) project, funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), is one of the largest public-private partnerships in AD research. In 2016, it began its Longitudinal Cohort Study (LCS) that followed over 2,000 people and collected a wide range of data to help further our understanding of the early stages of AD. Soon after the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative) launch in 2020, EPAD made access to this LCS data available to researchers through the AD Workbench.
What the Dataset Contains
The dataset contains:
- 2,096 participants screened across 31 sites in 10 European countries
- Genome-wide genotyping performed on 1,983 participant samples, assaying 713,127 SNPs across the autosomes
- PLINK-formatted files of pre-QC’d data
- Subsets of the data filtered for quality, ancestry, and relatedness.
- Pairwise relatedness was calculated across all participants with a relatedness table
- Three independent imputation analyses performed using the HRC, 1000Genomes and TOPMed imputation panels
- Data collection period: May 2016 – February 2020
- Funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), a European public-private research partnership
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What Researchers Can Do With This Dataset
This dataset supports research into the genetic makeup of early-stage Alzheimer's disease, including studies of relatedness and ancestry within the cohort, and analyses that combine genotype data with the LCS's cognitive, clinical, and neuroimaging data. Independent imputation panels support researchers working across different reference populations or replication studies.
How to Access The Dataset
The EPAD Consortium LCS vIMI Biosamples dataset is discoverable through the AD Discovery Portal and accessible within individually permissioned AD Workbench workspaces at no cost to qualified researchers. AD Workbench provides free compute, virtual machines, and multimodal analysis tools and allows researchers to bring their own code, models, and approved external datasets into their workspace.
Following approval to access EPAD data, the user can transfer the v.IMI files to their workspace. Genomic data files, however, are not accessed in the same way. The EPAD Genomics Shared Drive will be linked to the user’s workspace virtual machine.