Interviews
We are excited to initiate a series of interviews to feature the CLAIMS partners, offering each of you the opportunity to showcase your perspective, motivations and contributions to the CLAIMS project.
Prof. Dana Horakova, MD, PhD
Prof. Dana Horakova, MD, PhD
Short bio:
Professor Dana Horakova, MD, PhD, graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in 1992. Since 1999 she has been working at the MS Centre of the 1st Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague. In 2006 she completed a six-month internship at BNAC in Buffalo, USA. In 2010 she received her PhD degree with the thesis “Predictive markers for clinical development in MS patients”.
Dr. Horakova is a member of the immunology committee of the Czech Neurological Society and serves as an expert guarantor of the Czech national ReMuS registry. She was the Chair of the MSBase Scientific Leadership Group from 2014 to 2020 and is currently a member of the SLG and a member of the MSBase Board of Directors.
Her key research interests include – markers of disease activity and response to treatment (clinical and MRI, especially implementation and validation of quantitative volumetric MRI techniques in routine clinical practice) and the use of databases and registries in MS.
- Introduce your current position and affiliation; and can you provide an overview of your organization’s role within the CLAIMS project
I am a neurologist and I work in the largest MS centre in the Czech Republic. We provide comprehensive care to almost 4,000 patients. - What motivated you to participate in the CLAIMS project and what specific expertise or contributions do you bring to the consortium?
I have a long-standing interest in the implementation of quantitative MRI in clinical practice and the use of data in registries. In my centre we have a uniform system of examining patients on the same MR machine in a uniform protocol and we enter all data in a structured way into the database system. We plan to provide these MR scans together with clinical data to the CLAIMS project. At the same time, we would like to start collecting Patient Reported Outcomes. Here I believe that Icompanion application can help in this data collection. - What impact do you hope the CLAIMS project will have on the field of Multiple Sclerosis research and patient care?
I believe that processing MR data with advanced software techniques in conjunction with clinical data and the use of AI technologies can help in defining new MS phenotypes and in physician decision making. - Lastly, is there any additional message or insight you would like to share with our audience regarding your organization’s involvement in the CLAIMS project or your overall commitment to advancing Multiple Sclerosis research and patient care?
MS is a very complex, serious neurological disease. To properly assess disease activity, we need comprehensive data that must be reliable, and the clinician must receive it in real time, optimally at a single point of contact.
