Guest View: US must rise to occasion in Alzheimer's research - SouthCoastToday.com

By GEORGE VRADENBURG

January 06, 2014 12:00 AM

Recently, world leaders made a historic commitment to stop Alzheimer's and other dementia by 2025 at the G8 Dementia Summit convened by Prime Minister David Cameron in London.

The question moving forward will be whether the United States — the leader in biomedical research and drug development — leads this effort or sits in the backseat while others take the wheel. With 44 million people worldwide suffering from dementia — a number projected to triple to 135 million by 2050 — it's clear that the latter is not an option.

The truth is that while no one country can stop Alzheimer's, only the United States has the resources and position to lead the mobilization of a globally coordinated counter-offensive against the international health crisis of our time. We set the standard for the global response to HIV/AIDS, we can and should do it for the greatest unaddressed health need of this century.

This speaks to the need for the Obama administration and Congress to act swiftly and set the wheels in motion in the global "fight-back" against Alzheimer's. And make no mistake, time is running out. By 2050, Alzheimer's alone will cost the U.S. a staggering $1.2 trillion annually, which leaves us with a choice: Invest now or continue to pay staggering costs of care later.

Currently, the U.S. only spends about $500 million annually on Alzheimer's research, less than one-half percent of the cost of care. If we are to have even a shot at stopping Alzheimer's, it will require the U.S. and other nations to commit to at least 1 percent of the cost of care to research. Beyond this, we'll also need to advance new and innovative financing mechanisms that diversify our funding portfolio, and create new technology tools and processes to accelerate scientific discovery and drug development.

But funding isn't the only roadblock to 2025. The absence of international norms on Alzheimer's discovery and care delivery is also at the root of many of our problems. For instance, of the 5.2 million people living with Alzheimer's in the U.S., an estimated less than 1 percent participate in Alzheimer's clinical trials. This is simply inexcusable. The United Kingdom is at 5 percent and is targeting a goal of 10 percent by 2015. Moreover, diagnosis rates in the U.S. are estimated at 50 percent; Scotland is at 64 percent.

We can begin to change this, however, by establishing internationally accepted norms by which we rank countries' performance in addressing Alzheimer's, similar to the way we already rank nations' proficiency in math or sciences. This will help to introduce a much-needed sense of urgency and accountability for Alzheimer's efforts, and a system from which low-performing nations can learn from high-performing nations, and in turn, raise the level of every nation's game. For example, were we to learn from the UK and set a goal of committing to enroll 10 percent of our population that suffers from Alzheimer's in clinical trials, we could enlist an army of citizen scientists to accelerate the testing of new methods of Alzheimer's prevention and treatment. Were we to raise our diagnosis rates, we would be better able to determine who needs and how to deliver dementia care.

Increasing enrollment in clinical trials is important; so is the creation of a global clinical trial platform and fast read-out biomarkers that shorten the time and risk of getting candidate therapies to market. Such a platform would standardize how patient data is collected and shared across the globe, as well as bring crowd-sourcing and big data to the fight against Alzheimer's.

On top of this, we'll also need consistent international regulatory policies that put candidate treatments for Alzheimer's in the fast lane in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

Central themes of all of these measures are common goals and collaboration. Without both, we won't stand a chance against this disease, and tens of millions of families around the world will suffer the consequences for decades. Yet in order to collaborate, we need leadership to bring us all together with vision, resolve and hope — that is the role and responsibility of the United States.

Now is the time for the United States to seize this historic opportunity and mobilize the world in the fight against a horrific epidemic that stands to destroy families and shake the financial stability of the planet.

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