- The U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the government's National Institutes of Health (NIH), aims to build an Alzheimer's research database.
- Alzheimer's Association Chief Science Officer Maria Carrillo said in an interview that the organization plans to apply for the NIA platform grant, which will award $50 million annually for up to six years.
- The platform will pull data from medical records, insurance claims, pharmacies, mobile devices, sensors, and various government agencies capable of housing long-term health information on 70% to 90% of the U.S. population, Reuters reported citing officials of the grant, which had not been previously reported.
- "Real-world data is what we need to make a lot of decisions about the effectiveness of medications and looking really at a much broader population than most clinical trials can cover," Dr. Nina Silverberg, director of the NIA's Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers program, said in an interview.
- The database could help identify healthy people at risk for Alzheimer's, which affects about 6 million Americans, for future drug trials.
- It also aims to address the chronic underrepresentation of patients in Alzheimer's trials and could help increase enrollment outside urban academic medical centers.
- Once built, the platform could also track patients after they receive treatments such as Eisai Co Ltd (OTC:ESALY)/Biogen Inc's (NASDAQ:BIIB) Leqembi (lecanemab), which won accelerated U.S. approval in January and is under FDA review for complete approval.
- The U.S. Medicare health plan for older adults will likely require such tracking in a registry as a condition of reimbursement for Leqembi.
- Photo by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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