SANKT AUGUSTIN – The Alzheimer Research Initiative, e.V., has awarded Dr. Alpha Tom Kodamullil from the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI an “Early Career Grant.“ This prestigious funding, valued at €60,000, will allow her to investigate innovative, personalized Alzheimer's therapies from January 1, 2025, until the end of 2026.

Dr. Alpha Tom Kodamullil has been recognized with an “Early Career Grant“ from the Alzheimer Research Initiative e.V. (AFI). She is Deputy Head of the Bioinformatics Business Area and leads the Applied Semantics research group at Fraunhofer SCAI. The award includes €60,000 in research funding for her project titled “Personalized Clinical Embedding of Patients (CLEP).” This project aims to develop a method that links patient data with existing knowledge about neurodegenerative diseases. By identifying specific patterns and disease mechanisms, Dr. Kodamullil seeks to define subgroups of patients to enable the development of tailored Alzheimer's treatments.

The Importance of Dementia Research in an Aging Society

“Personalized approaches have great potential to treat Alzheimer's patients more precisely and effectively,” explains Dr. Kodamullil. Given the rising number of elderly individuals in the population, advancing dementia research is crucial. “To achieve this, bureaucratic hurdles limiting access to patient data for research purposes must be reduced,” she emphasizes.

Dr. Kodamullil's research group at Fraunhofer SCAI specializes in systematically developing knowledge graphs and semantic approaches to organize global data and knowledge about neurodegenerative diseases. The funded research project builds upon these existing efforts, integrating clinical data with personalized knowledge graphs to better personalize patient treatment.

The Alzheimer Research Initiative e.V. is a nonprofit organization funded by donations and dedicated to supporting groundbreaking projects in clinical Alzheimer's research. By financially supporting researchers, the organization plays a key role in advancing innovative therapies.

For more information about the Applied Semantics group within the Bioinformatics Business Area at Fraunhofer SCAI, please visit: https://www.scai.fraunhofer.de/en/business-research-areas/bioinformatics/fields-of-research/Applied-Semantics.html