The federal government plans to build a massive Alzheimer's research database capable of tracking the long-term health of up to 90 percent of the population, according to an exclusive April 3 report from Reuters.
The National Institute of Aging is funding the six-year project, which could cost up to $300 million. The goal is to build a database capable of housing long-term health data on 70 percent to 90 percent of the U.S. population to gain better insights into the mechanisms of Alzheimer's and drive treatment advancements. Data will be pulled from various sources, including medical records, insurance claims and mobile devices, sources told the news outlet. The platform would be built with restrictions to protect people's health data.
"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," Nina Silverberg, PhD, director of the NIA's Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers program, told Reuters.
Another goal of the project is to identify healthy individuals who could be at risk of the disease and connect them to future drug trials.