To tackle the human health challenges that face the world today, the FNIH develops collaborations with top experts from government, industry, academia and the not-for-profit sector and provides a neutral environment where we can work productively toward a common goal.
In 2016, the AMP Executive Committee approved the planning of an AMP effort to confront the challenges presented by Parkinson’s disease (PD). This complements current efforts in the areas of Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes and the autoimmune disorders of rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus). A critical component of this partnership is that all members have agreed to make the AMP Parkinson’s disease (AMP PD) data and analyses publicly available to the broad biomedical community.
National Institutes of Health convened the 3rd Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) Research Summit on March 1-2, 2018 in Bethesda, Maryland. The program built on the foundation laid by the 2012 and 2015 NIH AD Research Summits and the U.S. National Alzheimer’s Project Act (NAPA)/National Plan to Address AD.
On October 16-17, 2017, the National Advisory Council on Alzheimer’s Research, Care and Services held a two-day Summit on the NIH campus entitled: National Research Summit on Dementia Care: Building Evidence for Services and Supports. The purpose of the Summit was to address the growing need for evidence that improves the quality of care and support provided to persons with dementia and their caregivers.
Held in 2017, the Cognitive Aging Summit III will brought together experts in a variety of research fields to discuss the most cutting edge advances in our understanding of age-related brain and cognitive changes, with a particular focus on resilience and reserve.
The 2016 Alzheimer’s Disease-Related Dementias (ADRD) Summit was hosted by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in collaboration with the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and held March 29-30, 2016 at the Natcher Auditorium on the NIH Campus.
The Accelerating Medicines Partnership Alzheimer’s Disease Project (AMP-AD) is a precompetitive partnership among government, industry, and nonprofit organizations that focuses on discovering novel, clinically relevant therapeutic targets and on developing biomarkers to help validate existing therapeutic targets.
This project will aim to standardize and validate measurement methods for inflammatory markers associated with Alzheimer’s Disease and/or Major Depressive Disorder to ultimately identify a unique biosignature of disease. The identified biosignature would greatly assist with medication development, patient diagnosing, and patient selection for clinical trials.
The AD Targeted Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Proteomics Project, completed in Q2Y15, completed an initial validation of a multiplexed panel of known biomarkers, examined BACE levels and enzymatic activity, and set up the initial validation of a mass spectroscopy panel using AD cerebrospinal fluid samples from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI).
Sarcopenia 2 seeks to establish evidence-based cut-points for muscle mass and strength and determine their predictive validity for clinically meaningful outcomes (such as mobility, fractures, hospitalization and death); evaluate relative strength as a discriminator for mobility limitation and incident disability; and explore the potential usefulness of sarcopenia as a clinical endpoint in randomized clinical trials.
The Sarcopenia 1 project launched in 2010 and aimed to establish the first evidence-based definition of sarcopenia (muscle weakness), which is still not recognized as a medical condition.