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Credit: Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative
The Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative (DAC), a pioneering worldwide initiative seeking to cure Alzheimer’s disease and improve brain health, today announced they will work with Janssen Research & Development, LLC, a Johnson & Johnson company, and Beckman Coulter Diagnostics, two leading pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies, to advance the assay validation of blood-based biomarkers (BBMs) for Alzheimer’s disease for global use in diverse populations.
DAC, via its Global Cohorts Program, has enabled this trans-national, multi-party collaboration and provided support for bio sample collection at the Catholic University of Korea (CUK) in South Korea in a study led by Hyun-Kook Lim, MD PhD. The samples will represent people across all stages of Alzheimer’s disease—healthy control, mild cognitive impairment, pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease—based on clinical assessments and amyloid PET confirmation.
DAC’s efforts to build an ecosystem of industry partners is meant to bridge knowledge gaps of low and middle-income country populations and enable the development of globally generalizable blood-based tests for Alzheimer’s disease. Going forward, DAC aims to catalyze biological sample collection across its global cohorts and generate similar insights from other populations around the world.
“The opportunity to partner with the Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative enables our work at Beckman Coulter Diagnostics to develop a scalable, patient friendly blood-based test for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Zivjena Vucetic, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer at Beckman Coulter Diagnostics. “DAC’s access to a wide range of Alzheimer’s disease patient cohorts, especially from under-represented populations, highlights the true heterogeneity of the disease. Accessing diverse patient samples is critical to our ability to develop a high-quality, reliable immunoassay test available to patients around the world.”
BBMs hold promising potential to transform the Alzheimer’s disease diagnostic pathway and patient journey. Blood collection is less invasive, less costly, and is already well-established in clinical practice, meaning it can be performed in various settings, is widely accepted by patients, and requires no further specialized training for healthcare professionals. Successful deployment of BBMs will provide patients with critical diagnostic information and improve access to appropriate care. BBMs could greatly reduce the burden of biomarker testing by triaging patients or potentially confirming the presence of beta amyloid at scale.
This inclusive research program is critical to DAC’s work to diversify research since nearly all BBM studies in Alzheimer’s disease to date have been conducted on Caucasian populations of Western European or American origin.
“This program is an important demonstration of DAC’s commitment to increasing diversity and trans-national collaborations in Alzheimer’s disease research. Our partnerships with the Catholic University of Korea, Janssen Research & Development, LLC, and Beckman Coulter will enable development of more robust and globally valid diagnostics blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease,” said Vaibhav Narayan, DAC Executive Vice President.
Note: To accomplish its mission to diversify research, DAC welcomes collaboration with research institutions, startups, industry partners and others. Of particular interest are partners that do a variety of analyses (genetics, epigenetics, proteomics) to generate maximum biomarker and diagnostic insights. If you are interested in contributing to DAC research or supporting its work, please contact Irene Meier, Executive Director, Program Strategy and Operations._____________________________________________________________________________
About the Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative
The Davos Alzheimer's Collaborative (DAC) is a pioneering worldwide initiative to cure Alzheimer’s disease and improve brain health, seeking to mirror the success of global efforts against infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, Covid, and Malaria. DAC is extending global research beyond its current focus on traditional Western European ethnic populations into the highly diversified populations of the Global South, where the vast majority of those with Alzheimer’s live. By introducing lower-cost screening and diagnostic tools as well as new treatment and prevention modalities in primary care and community health settings, DAC is driving implementation of health system solutions that are appropriate for worldwide application. DAC also promotes the vital importance of brain health throughout the lifespan by addressing cardiometabolic and lifestyle factors, especially in early and mid-life. Absent effective action at scale around the world, by 2050, more than 150 million families and half a billion people will be personally impacted by dementia, creating a social, financial, economic, and global security disaster of historic proportions. DAC was launched in Davos in 2021 by the World Economic Forum and the Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer's Disease. For more information, please visit: davosalzheimerscollaborative.org.
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