National Institute on Aging Aims Building $300M Alzheimer's Research Database

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 ESALY/Biogen Inc's 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.
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