$230M for Big Disease

The National Institutes of Health is partnering with 10 drug companies to find new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus.

Written byJef Akst

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FLICKR, E-MAGINE ARTThe National Institutes of Health (NIH) this week (February 4) announced the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP), a five-year, $230 million program through which the agency will team up with 10 drug companies to study Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus. The NIH will provide approximately half of that sum, while the rest of the funds will come from the program’s industry partners, including Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, and Sanofi.

“This is a job too big for any single group,” NIH Director Francis Collins said at a press conference yesterday.

Currently, drug candidates for these diseases fail at an astounding rate of 95 percent, and those that succeed take a decade and more than $1 billion to bring to market, ScienceInsider reported. AMP, which has been more than two years in the making and will be overseen by the Foundation for the NIH, aims to cut down these figures by combining big data approaches with molecular studies on the mechanisms underlying these diseases.

“We are still navigating in a landscape where a lot of this richness in information is not, in a consistent manner, brought together,” Pfizer President of Worldwide Research & Development Mikael Dolsten ...

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Meet the Author

Jef Akst
Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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