The NIH-led www.hih.gov public private partnership to transform and accelerate drug development achieved a significant milestone with the launch of the new Alzheimer’s Big Data portal to include the first wave of data to be used by the research community.
The new data sharing and analysis resource is part of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) www.nih.gov/science/amp/index.htm. AMP brings together NIH, FDA, industry, and academic scientists from a variety of disciplines to translate knowledge faster and more successfully into new therapies.
The “Big Data Portal” was developed by Sage Bionetworks www.sagebase.org, a Seattle-based non-profit organization promoting open science. The academic teams in collaboration with Sage Bionetworks data scientists along with industry bioinformatics and drug discovery experts, are going to work collectively to apply cutting-edge analytical approaches to integrate molecular and clinical data from over 2,000 postmortem brain samples.
The opening of the AMP-AD Knowledge Portal www.synapse.org/#!Synapse:syn2580853 with the release of the first wave of data will enable sharing and analyses of extremely large and complex biomedical datasets.
The portal housing several waves of Big Data will enable the data to be generated during the AMP-AD Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Project www.nia.nih.gov/ alzheimers/amp-ad-target-discovery-and-preclinical-validation-project that will have multidisciplinary academic groups participating.
The AMP Steering Committee will be working with the National Institute for Aging (AIA) www.nia.nih.gov, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) www.ninds.nih.gov, FDA www.fda.gov, and four pharmaceutical companies including AbbVie www.abbvie.com, Biogen Idec http://biogenidec.com, GlaxoSmithKline www.gsk.com, and Eli Lilly www.lilly.com.
The Steering Committee is also going to work with four non-profit groups consisting of Alzheimer’s Association www.alz.com, Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation www.alzdiscovery.org, Geoffrey Beene Foundation http://geoffreybeene.com, and USAgainst Alzheimer’s www.usaainstalzheimers.org participating. The project is being managed by the Foundation for the NIH www.finih.org.
Also, one of the first steps was to select academic teams to work on the project. Researchers were selected from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai http://icahn.mssm.edu, MIT http://web.mit.edu, Harvard www.harvard.edu, University of Florida, Gainesville www.ufl.edu, and Emory University www.emory.edu.
Researchers are also involved from Rush University www.rushu.rush.edu, Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida www.mayoclinic.org, the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle www.systemsbiology.org and the University of California Los Angeles www.ucla.edu plus researchers from other academic centers are also participating.