🧠 Several advances are changing the fight against Alzheimer's

• For the first time, simple blood tests can show whether a person has Alzheimer's disease.
• Two drugs that slow the progression of the disease have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the FDA.
• The number of patients researchers can screen for clinical trials has risen from a couple per day to several hundred.

Faster diagnosis with blood tests

Alzheimer's used to be diagnosed with a PET scan or a spinal tap. Both methods were expensive and time-consuming. Now there are simple blood tests that show whether a person has the disease.

The new blood tests have allowed more patients to take part in clinical trials. Researchers used to be able to screen one or two possible participants per day. Now they can screen several hundred. This means new treatments can arrive sooner.

The diagnostics keep improving. Today's tests show whether a person has Alzheimer's right now. Within one or two years, it may become possible to determine whether a person will develop the disease in the future.

Drugs that slow the disease

The FDA has approved the first two treatments proven to modestly slow the progression of the disease. Early data suggest the effect could be considerably greater if the treatment is given early in the progression.

Research is underway into next-generation treatments that could be twice as effective as the current ones. A clinical trial is examining whether the drug donanemab can delay the onset of the disease or prevent it altogether. Results are expected late this year or early next year.

AI as a co-researcher

Artificial intelligence is now being used in the research. The AI agents Biomni-AD and Parthenon, the winners of the Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize, act as co-researchers. They pull permissioned datasets on their own and detect patterns a human might miss.

AI also helps researchers write their own code. That lets them run statistical analyses and test more hypotheses faster. Many researchers do not have access to a biostatistician or a data scientist. Now more of them can run the numbers themselves, while the statistics experts can spend their time on the most promising hypotheses.

Large datasets are shared

Platforms such as the Global Research and Imaging Platform, GRIP, make data and AI agents available at scale. The Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative now has more than 10,000 users from over 125 countries. The Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium holds more than 300 million unique protein measures for researchers to learn from.

The number of people in the US living with Alzheimer's has risen from 5.5 million in 2017 to an estimated 7.4 million today. Dementia costs the US more than $780 billion each year, of which more than $160 billion falls on the public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid.

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