The US National Institute on Aging (NIA) is funding a six-year, up to $300m project, to build a massive Alzheimer’s research database that can track the health of Americans for decades and enable researchers to gain new insights on the brain-wasting disease.
The NIA, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), aims to build a data platform capable of housing long-term health information on 70% to 90% of the population, Reuters reports.
The platform will draw on data from medical records, insurance claims, pharmacies, mobile devices, sensors and various government agencies.
“Real-world data is what we need to make a lot of decisions about the effectiveness of medications, looking at a much broader population than most clinical trials can cover,” said Dr Nina Silverberg, director of the NIA’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centres programme.
Tracking patients before and after they develop Alzheimer’s symptoms is integral to making advances against the disease, which can start some 20 years before memory issues develop.
The database could help identify healthy people at risk for Alzheimer’s, which affects about 6m Americans, for future drug trials.
The grant has been years in the making. The funding announcement sets its earliest start date at April 2024, with a goal to establish an Alzheimer’s registry 21 months later.
Alzheimer’s Association chief science officer Maria Carrillo said the organisation plans to apply for the NIA platform grant, which will award $50m a year for up to six years.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Concern over FDA’s fast-track approval of Alzheimer’s drugs
Impaired sleep linked to accumulation of Alzheimer’s marker
Clinical trial starts into whether light-and-sound-wave exposure can slow Alzheimer’s