NIH renews Alzheimers disease imaging initiative with $62M

The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health has renewed $62 million to support the National Institutes of Health’s Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) for an additional five years.

The aim of the study expansion, called ADNI2, is to gain new insights into the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease, with the goal of improving clinical trial design and aiding drug development. ADNI2 will seek to identify and track early changes in the brain before the onset of symptoms of Alzheimer’s by using imaging techniques and biomarker measures in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, said the foundation.

ADNI is a public-private partnership for Alzheimer’s research resulting in more than 170 published papers. Since ADNI’s launch in 2004, the data have been posted to a publicly accessible database available to qualified researchers globally. More than 1,700 researchers have signed up for access to the ADNI database and the data have been used in numerous clinical trial and modeling efforts, added the foundation.

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