Today in Washington, DC, a major new partnership was announced to speed the discovery phase of the drug and diagnostics development process – the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP).
AMP is a bold new venture of government, industry and leading non-profits, working together to increase the number of new therapies and diagnostic tools, and to reduce the time and cost of developing them. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), biopharmaceutical companies and non-profit organizations, including the Alzheimer’s Association, will collaborate to radically improve the efficiency and process for identifying and validating promising disease targets for drug design in order to improve the chances for success.
AMP will begin with several pilot projects in three disease areas: (1) Alzheimer’s disease, (2) Type 2 diabetes, and (3) the autoimmune disorders of rheumatoid arthritis and lupus.
A critical component of the partnership is that industry partners will make the AMP data and analyses publicly accessible to the broad community of researchers. Other innovative aspects of this project for Alzheimer’s include:
- Incorporating novel biological markers into three ongoing Alzheimer’s prevention trials, thus allowing a direct comparison in the ability of multiple markers – more than ever before – to track the progression of very early stage Alzheimer’s and potentially to predict clinical benefit of a therapy.
- Creating the first comprehensive proteomics database of the normal human brain, as well as “proteomics signatures” of Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain diseases. Proteomics generally refers to the large-scale experimental analysis of proteins. The two hallmark brain lesions of Alzheimer’s – amyloid plaques and tau tangles – are both related to problems with proteins.
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