Alzheimer’s Network for Treatment and Diagnostics created to collect real-world data

The Alzheimer’s Association is among a group of professional societies and research institutions that have launched the Alzheimer’s Network for Treatment and Diagnostics to collect data on patients treated with novel FDA-approved therapies.

Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, chief science officer at the Alzheimer’s Association, introduced the new network, known as ALZ-NET, and described its benefits in a presentation at the Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease annual meeting.

“We do absolutely need an agnostic way — agnostic for treatment, agnostic for diagnostics — to gather real-world evidence, because [the time is] upon us, it’s here now,” Carrillo told attendees. “And so, we are hopefully going to be able to work across the United States but are very interested in international collaborations.”

Patients starting or currently receiving treatment with a novel FDA-approved therapy for AD may enroll in ALZ-NET, which will monitor long-term patient health outcomes, response to therapy and adverse events. Patient data collected includes baseline demographic, medical, neurologic, genetic and biomarker information.

According to Carrillo, ALZ-NET aims to build and implement resources for clinical readiness as well.

“We don’t quite have [clinical readiness] yet,” she said. “And we’re going to roll out treatments with physicians and clinics that may not be prepared to deal with the complexities of these new treatments.”

In addition, Carrillo said that ALZ-NET will archive brain imaging and biospecimens, because both are important in terms of monitoring and analyzing disease progression.

“And of course, tracking health outcomes, which is important for all of us, because we want to ultimately ensure that our treatments are doing what we think they’re doing at the end of an 18-month clinical trial,” she said.

According to Carrillo, ALZ-NET officially launched in August 2022 and has just enrolled its first patient.