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The 2018 NIA-AA Symposium: Enabling Precision Medicine for Alzheimer’s through Open Science
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) and the Alzheimer’s Association convened a pre-AAIC conference symposium (July 19-20, Chicago) featuring an array of new research and translational infrastructure programs that operate under open-science principles to generate new mechanistic insights of disease and resilience, discover novel targets and biomarkers and develop data and research tools for precision medicine research. These programs were a result of the intense strategic planning and program development activities at the NIA carried out in collaboration with a multi-stakeholder community brought together by the NIH AD Research Summits (2012, 2015 and 2018) and made possible through the increased NIH funding for Alzheimer’s research. Over a day and half, over 250 symposium attendees heard the latest from the teams participating in the Accelerated Medicines Partnership for AD (AMP-AD) Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation program and the affiliated programs: M2OVE-AD, Resilience – AD, MODEL-AD and AlzPED. The symposium ended with highlights from the first set of grant awardees from NIA’s Translational Bioinformatics for Drug Repositioning and Combination Therapy program. The symposium also celebrated the launch of the Agora platform. Supported by the NIA and developed by Sage Bionetworks in collaboration with members of the AMP-AD academic and private partners (industry teams and the Alzheimer’s Association), Agora is an interactive, web-based tool designed to allow researchers at large to visually explore curated genomic analyses including AMP-AD candidate target nominations. The launch of the beta version featured over 100 early target nominations derived from unbiased computational analyses of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data generated from brain and plasma samples collected from multiple longitudinal cohorts and several AD Research Centers’ brain banks. For more details about the individual session and links to each presentation, please see below.