NEW YORK – The US National Institutes of Health and a coalition of private-sector partners are committing nearly $74.9 million to Alzheimer's disease research over the next five years in the newly announced second phase of the Accelerating Medicine Partnership for Alzheimer's Disease (AMP AD) program.
Called AMP AD 2.0, the new version of the 10-year-old program will support technologies including single-cell profiling and computational modeling to bring precision medicine to the development of new Alzheimer's treatments, NIH said Tuesday.
"AMP AD 2.0 aims to add greater precision to the molecular maps developed in the first iteration of this program," NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement. "This will identify biological targets and biomarkers to inform new therapeutic interventions for specific disease subtypes."
The Foundation of the NIH is managing the program, while the National Institute on Aging (NIA) is in charge of research activities. The NIA will contribute $61.4 million to the effort over the next five years, while private-sector partners including Eisai, Gates Ventures, Takeda Pharmaceutical, the Alzheimer's Association, and GlaxoSmithKline have collectively pledged almost $13.5 million, according to NIH.
Among other things, NIH funding will cover a data coordination center hosted by Sage Bionetworks, as well as six cross-disciplinary academic research teams, to be announced later.
"This partnership offers real hope to the tens of millions of people affected by Alzheimer's disease," FNIH President and Executive Director Maria Freire said. "Collaboration through the first round of AMP AD has already enabled breakthrough advances in researchers' understanding of how Alzheimer's disease progresses, uncovering numerous potential targets for drug therapy in a field where treatment options are severely limited."