NIH: Tech strategy is key for Alzheimer’s research

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released a set of recommendations that the organization hopes will provide a strategy for speeding the development of new interventions for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia through the use of new technologies and collaborations.

Among the recommendations:

• Expand integrative, data-driven research approaches such as systems biology and systems pharmacology.
• Develop computational tools and infrastructure in order to enable storage, integration and analysis of large-scale biological and other patient-relevant data.
• Leverage the use of wearable sensors and other mobile health technologies to inform discovery science as well as research on Alzheimer’s disease care.
• Engage citizens, caregivers and patients as equal partners in Alzheimer’s disease research.

“Alzheimer’s research is entering a new era in which creative approaches for detecting, measuring and analyzing a wide range of biomedical data sets are leading to new insights about the causes and course of the disease,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, MD, PhD, in a press release. “In these times of significant fiscal constraints, we need to work smarter, faster and more collaboratively. These recommendations underscore the importance of data sharing and multidisciplinary partnerships to a research community that looks to the NIH for guidance on the way forward.”