Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Program - Alzheimer's Disease 1.0

Overview

The Accelerating Medicines Partnership^® (AMP^®) Program Alzheimer’s disease (AMP AD) was the first stage of a precompetitive partnership among government, industry and nonprofit organizations that focused on discovering novel, clinically relevant therapeutic targets, and on developing biomarkers to help validate existing therapeutic targets for Alzheimer’s disease.

This multisector partnership, managed by the Foundation for the NIH from 2014-2022, focused on providing a data-driven approach for identification and validation of biomarkers and disease-relevant targets that will lead to increased clinical trial success.

About Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer's disease is projected to affect approximately 14 million people by the year 2060.  Alzheimer’s is a progressive brain disorder that is the most common cause of dementia in older adults. Dementia is the loss of thinking, remembering, and reasoning abilities (neuro cognitive functions) to the extent that it interferes with a person’s daily life and activities. It is not a normal part of aging and has many potential causes. Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by changes in the brain called amyloid plaques and tau tangles as well as a loss of connections between nerve cells (neurons) in the brain. Neurons transmit messages between different parts of the brain, and from the brain to muscles and organs in the body. AMP AD worked to further unravel the complex molecular changes involved in Alzheimer’s disease to speed up the identification of novel drug targets. For more information on Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias click here.

Need for New Therapies

There has been a high failure rate of Alzheimer’s disease drug candidates in end stage clinical trials due to lack of efficacy or unforeseen toxicity that demonstrates the continued need for a deeper understanding of disease complexity and a data-driven approach for identification and validation of disease-relevant targets.

The success of clinical trials aimed at developing new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease hinges on developing a deeper mechanistic understanding of disease drivers. AMP AD contributed to this effort through two projects:

• Biomarkers Project – explored the utility of tau imaging and novel fluid biomarkers for tracking responsiveness to treatment and/or disease progression.
• Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Project – integrated and shared analysis of large-scale molecular data from human brain samples with network modeling approaches and experimental validation to rapidly identify novel, clinically relevant therapeutic targets. Target discovery efforts for Alzheimer’s disease continue through the AMP AD 2.0 project.

Read more about AMP AD on the National Institute on Aging’s website.