The “Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) program for Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a joint venture between NIH, FDA, industry partners (Celgene, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Verily), and one non-profit organization (The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research MHFF) managed through the Foundations for NIH (FNIH).
The goal is to transform and accelerate drug development in PD by providing the expertise needed to determine which biomarkers show the greatest potential for predicting PD and the progression of the disease
AMP PD has launched a data portal http://amp-pd.org to provide de-identified information collected from 4, 298 PD patients and healthy controls to researchers working to develop effective therapies for the disease. The portal enables researchers to study complex data sets and perform genome-wide analyses at a scale previously impossible.
The AMP PD Knowledge Portal contains data from cerebrospinal fluid, RNA, plasma, and DNA samples previously collected through programs. These programs include the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) https://www.ninds.nih.gov, the BioFIND Study, the Harvard Biomarkers Study of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital, the NINDS Parkinson’s Disease Biomarkers Program, and from MJFF’s Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative.
Over the past 18 months, AMP PD scientists have worked on data to enter into the portal that is accurate and described in a consistent way. This crucial step, called data harmonization, allows information gathered from different programs to be compared, and provides best practices for integrating new data provided by the community into the platform. A unique feature enables researchers to analyze data from across an individual’s lifespan or disease course.