AMP-AD
Accelerating Alzheimer's Research and Drug Development
What is AMP?
The Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) is a bold new venture among the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 10 biopharmaceutical companies, and several nonprofit organizations to transform the current model for developing new diagnostics and treatments by jointly identifying and validating promising biological targets of disease. This precompetitive collaboration harnesses collective capabilities, scale, and resources across multiple sectors to improve therapeutic development efforts for complex, heterogeneous diseases.
AMP's goal is to understand such diseases more fully through research to identify and validate novel, clinically relevant therapeutic targets. As a result, it is expected to accelerate the process of bringing new medicines to patients.
AMP is an umbrella partnership with initial programs in three disease areas:
- Alzheimer’s disease
- Type 2 diabetes
- Autoimmune disorders of rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus (lupus)
This multi-sector partnership is managed by the Foundation for the NIH (FNIH). NIH and industry partners are sharing expertise and resources—more than $230 million of combined funding support and in-kind contributions over 5 years—in an integrated governance structure that enables the best-informed scientific contributions from all participants. A critical component of the partnership is making AMP data publicly accessible for use by the broad research community.
What is AMP-AD?
Dementia, of which Alzheimer's disease is the most common form, is estimated to affect 36 million people worldwide. This number is expected to rise to 115 million by 2050 unless an effective therapeutic is developed. The financial toll of dementia is already staggering: In the U.S. alone, the costs of caring for people over age 70 with dementia were estimated to be as high as $215 billion in 2010.
Despite a substantial R&D investment for Alzheimer's disease and advances in our understanding of the disease pathogenesis, safe and effective treatments are still lacking. This reflects the need for a change in how the academic, biopharmaceutical, and government sectors that participate in Alzheimer’s disease research and therapy development generate, share, and use knowledge to propel development of critically needed therapies. It is becoming apparent that real progress in developing effective therapies will require transforming the Alzheimer’s research and drug development process into one that is participatory, collaborative, well-integrated, and iterative.
The AMP-AD program 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 multisector partnership is managed by the Foundation for the NIH. The combined funding support for this 5-year endeavor is $92.5 million dollars.
AMP-AD budget: 5 years
|
Total project funding ($M) |
Total NIH funding ($M) |
Total industry funding ($M) |
Total non-profit funding ($M) |
|---|---|---|---|
|
$92.5*
|
$69.6
|
$21.9*
|
$1.0
|
*Does not include in-kind contributions of $40M
AMP-AD projects
- Biomarkers Project—This project explores the utility of tau imaging and novel fluid biomarkers for tracking responsiveness to treatment and/or disease progression.
- Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Project—This project seeks to shorten the time between discovery of potential drug targets to development of new drugs for Alzheimer’s treatment and prevention. The project integrates analysis of large-scale molecular data from human brain samples with network modeling approaches and experimental validation, and enables rapid, broad sharing of data and analytical tools.
