The US National Institutes on Aging (AIA), part of the government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH, is providing up to US$300 million over six years for a project to build a research database on Alzheimer’s disease.
The database is designed to help scientists learn more about the disease, which affects an estimated 6 million Americans, by monitoring the long-term health of 70-90% of the US population.
The platform will use data from medical records, insurance claims, pharmacies, mobile devices, sensors and various government agencies.
In an interview, Dr. Nina Silverberg, program director at the NIA Alzheimer’s Research Centers, said, “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,” as quoted by Reuters.
The database aims to identify healthy people at risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease for future drug trials and to address the current under-representation of people of color and other ethnicities in related clinical trials.
“The system would be built in a secure computing environment with a number of constraints to ensure the confidentiality of people’s health records,” Silverberg said.
According to the funding announcement, the first start date of the project is April 2024.
Alzheimer’s Association senior scientist Maria Carrillo said in an interview that the organization plans to apply for a platform grant that awards $50 million annually for up to six years.
Partha Bhattacharyya, director of data at the NIH Office of Data Resources and Analysis, said: We expect that this platform will help recruit researchers in the United States. If we want to play a bigger role in prevention, we have to start early. That is not at age 65.”
(With inputs from agencies)
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