Major drugmakers will share data from their clinical trials for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease in an effort to speed the development of new medicines to treat the brain disorders.
The database will give academic and industry researchers worldwide access to information from more than 4,000 patients with neurodegenerative diseases.
Bringing the data together, rather than keeping pieces of it within each drug company, will give scientists a larger amount of information on how the diseases progress and how they differ in various patients.
Backers hope the approach will jump-start research into treatments for some of the toughest and most common brain disorders. Despite decades of study, doctors still have few effective treatments for Alzheimer's disease, which affects more than 26 million people globally. It is the most common form of dementia.
An estimated 4 million people worldwide have Parkinson's disease, which causes trembling and other symptoms.
Information in the new database should help drugmakers design more efficient clinical trials of potential treatments, said Dr. Raymond Woosley, president and chief executive of the Critical Path Institute, a nonprofit organization working to improve drug development.
Some patients, for example, develop Alzheimer's in their 80s while for others it starts in their 40s, Woosley said. The disease probably evolves differently in those groups, but companies only have small numbers in each age range to study in their own trials.
"If you have 4,000 patients (in the database), you begin to have enough data to see their real course" and can target a drug to specific types of patients, Woosley said in an interview.
The database is coordinated by the Coalition Against Major Diseases, an organization of patient groups and 13 drugmakers that is part of the Critical Path Institute.
Companies in the coalition include Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, and Sanofi-Aventis.
Officials from the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the European Medicines Agency serve as advisers.
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