The Personalized Parkinson Project De Novo Cohort

This PPP de NOVO cohort aims to validate novel digital biomarkers for disease progression, fostering the unique research infrastructure and data collection protocol that are available. The PPP de NOVO cohort consists of patients with de novo (i.e., newly diagnosed and previously untreated) Parkinson's disease who will be followed longitudinally for two years. De novo patients create the opportunity to study disease progression without interference of pharmacological treatment. The observation of this natural process in the earliest course of the disease is highly relevant for the development disease modifying interventions, which are likely to have the biggest potential in the earliest phases of the disease, when the loss of substantia nigra cells is minimal. In particular, the investigators will deploy the PPP de NOVO cohort for the development of digital biomarkers that could serve as a surrogate or, with time, possibly as key secondary or even a primary outcome in future clinical trials of disease-modifying interventions. Digital biomarkers hold great promise in this regard, as they provide a means to objectively track patients and measure their function in their own living environment, unobtrusively, and over long periods of time. The outcomes are potentially more sensitive than currently available clinical scales, which also be included in the protocol and perhaps also more relevant as they provide an insight into daily life functioning over extended periods of time. The primary objective is to develop novel digital biomarkers that allow for measurement of disease progression in de novo PD patients. Our hypothesis is that digital progression biomarkers will have greater sensitivity and greater power for detecting disease progression than conventional scales. The secondary objective is to test the feasibility of the Proof-Of-Concept (POC) study protocol that UCB (Union Chimique Belge) Pharma will use for their potentially disease modifying treatment. The PPP de NOVO study is considered instrumental in optimizing planning, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation of the digital data collected in the POC study. The third objective of this study is to create an extensive longitudinal dataset describing the clinical and functional characteristics of a representative PD de novo cohort to allow researchers to investigate important unanswered questions in PD.