USA2 SPOTLIGHT

A July 22, 2017 Forbes article reported on discussion and debate over the latest AD research, including defining the right kind of study to discover the best treatments, at the AAIC gathering in London. "Members of the Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer’s Disease, including Bank of America, AARP, Pfizer, GE and United Healthcare, among others, should lead the charge in this important initiative. Accelerating Alzheimer’s research is the crux of their mission." The Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer’s Disease is convened by UsAgainstAlzheimer's.

MUST READS

A July 28, 2017 STAT article focused on Quebec’s debate over Canada’s assisted dying law. Legislators are thinking of expanding the medical assistance in dying law to allow patients with a disease like Alzheimer’s to make an advance request to end their lives, before their cognitive abilities slip away. In Canada, a doctor can administer life-ending drugs. In the US states where medical aid-in-dying is permitted, the patient is required take the the drugs. And in the Netherlands, where such advance requests are legal, they are rare.

A July 28, 2017 Medical Xpress article looked at efforts to group people with similar types of cognitive impairment, to create more homogeneous trials, in order to more precisely test the impact of investigational drugs for Alzheimer’s disease treatment. The research team used a multilayer clustering algorithm to sort through data points from two large studies of the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. 

RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

A July 28, 2017 Medical Xpress article spotlighted the PRISM project, which is utilizing brain imaging to try to link the function of neural networks to problematic behaviors, such as social withdrawal, which is often present in Alzheimer’s disease, so that drugs can be developed to target them precisely. According to Dr. Hugh Marston from Eli Lilly and Company, "The rationale by which I can develop molecules has currently been based on symptomatic classification of the disorders, rather than the biological classification of the disorders. Therefore, I am not designing drugs to treat a biological problem, I am designing drugs based on a philosophical classification system."

POLITICS

According to a July 27, 2017 STAT article, earlier this month the House Appropriations Committee approved a spending plan to reduce the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s budget by $198 million from 2017. The $1 billion Prevention and Public Health Fund, created by the Affordable Care Act, is also in jeopardy. In 2018, Department of Health and Human Services programs set to receive money from the fund include chronic disease management, Alzheimer’s education and outreach, and suicide prevention.