A “bold new venture” to share the latest knowledge about Alzheimer disease (AD) has been formed. The Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) brings together the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the FDA, 10 biopharmaceutical companies, scientists, and several nonprofit organizations to more quickly translate knowledge about AD into therapies.
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The partnership has launched a Big Data portal about AD for the research community, housing data to be disseminated over the 5 years of the AMP-AD Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Project. Academic teams, in collaboration with data scientists at Sage Bionetworks (a Seattle, Washington-based nonprofit organization promoting open science) and bioinformatics and drug discovery experts will apply “cutting-edge analytical approaches to integrate molecular and clinical data from more than 2,000 postmortem brain samples,” according to the NIH. The first wave of data was released March 4, 2015.
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“We are determined to reduce the cost and time it takes to discover viable therapeutic targets and bring new diagnostics and effective therapies to people with Alzheimer’s,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD. “The AD initiative of AMP is one way we can revolutionize Alzheimer’s research and drug development by applying the principles of open science to the use and analysis of large and complex human data sets.”
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The multisector partnership is led by the Foundation for the NIH. Combined funding for the 5-year endeavor is $92.5 million, coming mostly from the NIH but also from industry and nonprofits. Alzheimer disease is only one of the diseases the partners are focusing on—AMP also has programs for type 2 diabetes and the autoimmune diseases rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus.
For more information on the AD program, visit the AMP-AD Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Project web page at www.nia.nih.gov/alzheimers/amp-ad.