Computational methods for improving diagnosis and clinical management for multiple sclerosis

Purpose and goal:

The goal of this project was to build a consortium of participating universities and companies to address "HORIZON-HLTH-2022-TOOL-12-01-two-stage: Computational models for new patient stratification strategies" the call for proposals from EU horizon Europe, as well as to write an impactful proposal. We generated preliminary data, increased the number of partners, did two survey studies and held many zoom meetings with partners in proposal.

Expected results and effects:

A stage 1 proposal was submitted to EU. This was evaluated very positively when it came to Excellence (highest possible score, 5), but not when it came to impact where we only got a score of 2 out of 5. However, the project has led to the group of researchers and other partners that we built up continuing to work together despite the lack of funding. This has resulted in for example presentation of generated data at an international conference. We plan to seek new funds together.

Approach and implementation:

We built our proposal on collaboration that started in an already funded EU project, MultipleMS, that Profs Kockum and Jagodic coordinate. We analyzed the call text in detail and identified areas where we did not have expertise and engaged experts in these areas. Furthermore, we generated preliminary data both in the form of questionnaire studies with stakeholders and modeling of register data. We held many zoom meetings to develop concepts in the study and write the application text.