Biomarkers for Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia Consortium

Biomarkers for Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia (MarkVCID) is an NIH-funded consortium dedicated to finding biomarkers involved in age-related thinking and memory problems. Alzheimer's disease and other dementias leave signatures on brain scans or in the blood called biomarkers. The MarkVCID study will measure a panel of candidate biomarkers in 1800 participants and watch them closely to see what they tell us about changes in brain function and risk of memory loss. Age-related problems in thinking and memory represent some of the greatest risks to public health in the US and globally. Diseases that affect small blood vessels in the brain have been shown to be major contributors to these changes. However, research and patient care can be held back by limited biomarkers that identify who should be treated. The MarkVCID Consortium includes 17 US medical centers, a Coordinating Center, an External Advisory Committee, and NIH leadership. Data and biospecimens collected as part of this research study will be stored in a research database and biorepositories, so that researchers can use this information to study brain function.

Biomarkers for Vascular Contributions to Cognitive Impairment and Dementia (MarkVCID) is an NIH-funded multisite consortium dedicated to developing promising predictive, diagnostic, target engagement and progression candidate biomarkers of small vessel disease in VCID. MarkVCID is a collaborative consortium of nine North American research sites (consisting of 17 institutions nationwide), a Coordinating Center, External Advisory Committee, and NIH leadership. MGH serves as the Consortium's Coordinating Center and is comprised of an administrative and data core providing participating research sites with a common support infrastructure that facilitates cross-site collaborations, oversees development of standard operating procedures and data collection methods and manages consortium-wide data. In phase two of the MarkVCID study, research sites are charged with enrolling and following ≥200 diverse human subjects with cognitive complaints and/or early symptomatic stages of cognitive impairment and dementia potentially associated with cerebrovascular small vessel disease. Sites will share data with the Coordinating Center which will be used for validation studies of chosen consortium biomarkers. Throughout the duration of the study, sites will utilize harmonized procedures and data collection methods to engage in multi-site biomarker validation. Both Cores comply with regulations for the protection of human research subjects (including Good Clinical Practices (GCP), 21 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR)) and with the International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) Regulations E2A and E6.