Can we just talk? That would seem to be the critical lesson behind what may be the biggest breakthrough in awhile in Alzheimer’s research.
    The New York Times recently reported that scientists and executive from nonprofit groups, universities, drug and medical-imaging industries, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health actually have collaborated in an unprecedented way that has led to the identification of biological markers that indicate the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in the human brain. This collaboration has led to numerous scientific papers about the use of PET scans and tests of spinal fluids in early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
    To get to this stage, participants had to agree to “making every single finding public immediately, available to anyone with a computer anywhere in the world,” wrote New York Times reporter Gina Kolata. “No one would own the data. No one could submit patent applications, though private companies would ultimately profit from any drugs or imaging tests developed as a result of the effort.”
    One quote by Dr. John Q. Trojanowski from the University of Pennsylvania was particularly insightful about the achievement of getting these various parties to work together. “It was unbelievable. It’s not science the way most of us have practiced it in our careers. But we all realized that we would never get biomarkers unless all of us parked our egos and intellectual-property noses outside the door and agreed that all of our data would be public immediately,” he said.
    This study’s uniqueness was immediately evident to me after writing a sharepost about a recent Newsweek article that detailed the disjointed research and development effort for drug development. In that article, authors Sharon Begley and Mary Carmichael described a system that involved five steps:

• Identifying a gene, protein or biological pathway that causes the disease.
• Testing any finding on lab animals.
• If the lab tests are safe, seeking a patent.
• Identifying a commercial partner to develop the discovery once a patent is issued.
• Further testing on larger animals and eventually people.

     The New York Times story illustrated that these challenges have presented to research about Alzheimer’s. “The problem in the field was that you had many different scientists in many different universities doing their own research with their own patients and with their own methods,” Dr. Michael Weiner, who directed this collaboration which was known as the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), told the New York Times. “Different people using different methods on different subjects in different places were getting different results, which is not surprising. What was needed was to get everyone together and to get a common data set.”