Day: 3 June 2016

Erasmus Universitair Medisch Centrum Rotterdam (EMC) is the academic hospital of the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands and home to the Erasmus University faculty of medicine. The largest university medical center in the Netherlands, EMC plays a key role in research, education and patient care in the Netherlands. Research at EMC combines its internationally acknowledged expertise in the fields of clinical sciences, health sciences and biomedical sciences. The Erasmus Medical Center ranks #1 among the top European institutions in clinical medicine and #20 in the world according to the Times Higher Education rankings.
The aim is to translate bench discoveries to bedside applications to daily community care. Research at the medical faculty is centred on the fields of Genetics, Health Sciences including Epidemiology & Biostatistics and Public Health, Cardiovascular disease, Neuroscience, Psychiatry. EMC has a leading position in these fields.
The proposed research will be conducted in the Department of Epidemiology at EMC. The Department of Epidemiology is responsible for training medical and postgraduate students at EMC in the principles of epidemiology. The Department of Epidemiology is one of the participating departments in the research school NIHES (Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences). The department is also home to the two large prospective cohort studies, the Rotterdam Study including almost 15,000 participants over 45 years of age and Generation R, including almost 10,000 children and their parents.
Research in the Department of Epidemiology focuses on cardiovascular disease epidemiology, epidemiology of neurological and psychiatric diseases and ophthalmologic diseases. In addition, research groups focus on genetic epidemiology, endocrinological epidemiology, pharmaco-epidemiology and on clinical epidemiology of radiological procedures.
The department has research consultancy facilities in clinical epidemiology and in biostatistics and extensive expertise in genetics, metabolomics and epidemiology and in large-scale population studies.

The Department of Psychiatry is part of the Leiden Univeristy Medical Center. The LUMC is a modern center for research, education and patient care with a high profile and a strong scientific and international reputation. It’s unique research practice, ranging from pure fundamental medical research to applied clinical research, places LUMC among world leaders. The intensive collaboration between LUMC, Leiden University and the large Leiden Bio Science Park, with amongst others the Center for Human Drug Research (CHDR), creates unique possibilities for medical innovation. The LUMC department of psychiatry has specialised inpatient and outpatient clinics for mood and anxiety disorders and clinical and experimental research units. Research focusses on the treatment, phenomenology and neurobiology of disorders of emotion regulation and their interactions over the lifespan. In 2014 the department of psychiatry published 80% of its papers in a top 25% journal. As described in more detail below, the department and its close collaborators have ample experience in conducting clinical studies and cohort studies with extensive phenotypical and neurobiological assessments. This fits well with the main tasks foreseen for the LUMC in the PRISM proposal:
In 2002, the Leiden University Medical Center and the large regional Mental Health Provider Rivierduinen have implemented Routine Outcome Monitoring (ROM) in routine clinical care for patients with Mood, Anxiety and Somatoform disorders. In the Leiden ROM project, extensive baseline assessments (comprising a standardized diagnostic interview, administration of rating scales and several self-reported measures, covering symptomatology, functioning etc) are performed in 80% of all intakes, with follow-up assessments in those starting treatment. Dedicated Web-based software has been developed to assist in this task.The collected data are used in scientific analyses, measurement of the quality of care, and benchmarking. Research with ROM data encompasses psychometrics, epidemiology, phenotyping, neurobiology and genotyping (MASH cohort), and treatment efficiency. Furthermore, the ROM infrastructure can be used for patient selection. Baseline data and follow-up data of over 10,000 patients are available. We have extended ROM and the MASH bank by including a cohort of 1,300 subjects from the general population.
Since 2004, the department is also one of the three main assessment and recruitment centers for the large 10-year longitudinal NESDA study (Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety, www.nesda.nl). NESDA combines extensive phenotyping of 2896 subjects with neurobiological and physiological assessments, including genetic profiling, neuropsychological testing and MRI. The department is also a main assessment and recruitment center for several comparable multi-center cohort studies, such as the Netherlands Study on Depression in Old age (NESDO) and the Netherlands Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Association Study (NOCDA).
The department is actively involved in the interfaculty Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC, see www.libc-leiden.nl) and in the multidisciplinary LUMC Leiden Center for Translational Neuroscience (LCTN). The LIBC and LCTN provide an excellent infrastructure and expertise in MRI and EEG, and in basic and clinical neuroscience approaches. Furthermore, close collaboration with the CHDR (Center for Human Drug Research) via Prof. van Gerven, research director CNS at the CHDR and research staff member at our department adds to expertise in designing and conducting clinical trials.
The Leiden University Medical Center’s (LUMC) Department of Psychiatry will 1) participate with cohorts of well characterized patients in the data mining based on available clinical proxies for social withdrawal, sensory processing and attention (WP 2 and 5), 2) serve as a ‘deep phenotyping’ site (WP 4) and 3) as a potential clinical centre for the use and involvement in regulatory discussions on PRISM developed biomarkers (WP7).

SBGneuro provides expertise in the acquisition, quality control, analysis and interpretation of MR-based neuorimaging data as an outcome measure in clinical trials.

We are committed to developing and applying the very best methodology, to enable functional and structural MRI to fulfil its rich potential as a powerful, non-invasive biomarker for a wide range of diseases and disease treatments. By measuring and comparing many aspects of brain function, we believe that we can obtain objective, sensitive information that can be a valuable complement to existing methods for investigating neuropsychiatric disease and potential treatments. By bringing together leading researchers in this field, we apply the very best science to this important clinical tool.