The team of Jan Rusz, Ph.D., from the Department of Circuit Theory at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague is celebrating a success. It has received a prestigious ERC (European Research Council) CZ grant worth CZK 19 million. It is awarded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MŠMT) to research projects that applied for an ERC grant awarded by the European Research Council, made it to the second round, where they received an A or B rating, but were not awarded the grant due to a lack of funding from European sources. The aim of the ERC CZ program is to support excellent research in the Czech Republic.
The research, which will involve scientists from the FEE CTU as well as experts from the First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University and the General University Hospital in Prague (VFN), will focus on detecting the symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
Patients with this disease experience deterioration in motor skills, often primarily walking and cognition. At the same time, neuropsychiatric symptoms such as depression or anxiety may appear. Doctors examine patients with multiple sclerosis using magnetic resonance imaging, clinical and laboratory tests, which have relatively low sensitivity in detecting disease activity. In addition, these tests are only performed during regular visits to the doctor and are therefore not sensitive enough to quickly detect the progression of the disease. At present, it is therefore impossible to predict when a sudden worsening of symptoms (known as an attack, or manifestation of damage to the nervous system) will occur, and the progression of the disease is often identified only after a time lag, which delays the possibility of therapeutic intervention.
"If it were possible to predict multiple sclerosis attacks, the doctor would give the patient appropriate medication to stop the attack or shorten its duration. And that can have a significant effect on the prognosis of the disease," explained Dr. Rusz, adding that it is currently impossible to predict the onset of an attack in advance.
In addition to further research into the pathogenesis of multiple sclerosis and the development of new drugs, one of the key challenges facing science today is to improve the monitoring of disease activity. "Increasing the sensitivity and complexity of these methods can not only lead to more accurate and effective treatment, but also improve the clinical evaluation of new drugs, which could lead to broader and more effective therapeutic options in the future," explains Doc. MUDr. Tomáš Uher, Ph.D., from the First Faculty of Medicine at Charles University and the General University Hospital in Prague.
Hello, telephone, do I have multiple sclerosis?
The symptoms of multiple sclerosis can appear several years before the onset of the disease, but to such a small extent that they are not normally noticeable. According to Doc. Rusze, the key to detecting them is a change in speech.
"Speech is very universal because it reflects three components that change as a result of multiple sclerosis. These are motor skills, cognition, and speech emotions. With their help, we want to find a biomarker for disease progression. We will test it at various stages of multiple sclerosis, where there is a chance of detecting hidden disease progression and predicting sudden worsening of the disease (a so-called disease attack)," explained Doc. Rusz.
In the first phase of the research, experts will focus on developing algorithms and applications for smartphones. As part of the subsequent testing, patients will receive a smartphone with this application, which will monitor their phone calls and evaluate the likelihood of an attack and worsening of the disease.
Although the ERC CZ program will fund this research for two years, experts plan to continue working on it in the following years, when the application should be finally ready for use.
A similar app has already been developed for patients with Parkinson's disease by the research team led by Doc. Rusz, in collaboration with doctors from the National Institute for Neurological Research and the First Faculty of Medicine at Charles University. Their discovery helps with early diagnosis, which is essential for this disease.
