PHOENIX, AZ (November 27, 2016)—Banner Alzheimer’s Institute (BAI) was featured on CBS 60 Minutes in November 2016, highlighting the Institute’s groundbreaking efforts to advance a new era of Alzheimer’s prevention. The two-part story focused on the trial of an experimental anti-amyloid treatment aimed at preventing Alzheimer’s in members of the world’s largest autosomal dominant Alzheimer’s kindred in Colombia, South America. The kindred includes more than 5,000 living family members with more than one thousand of them carrying a rare genetic mutation that typically triggers Alzheimer’s symptoms around age 45. The trial provides a chance to introduce an anti-amyloid treatment before the onset of symptoms, when the disease is already extensive, in order to give it the best chance to work.
The segment, The Alzheimer’s Laboratory, which aired on Sunday, November 27, featured Eric Reiman, M.D., Executive Director, and Pierre Tariot, M.D., Director, of BAI and discussed BAI’s leadership role in the effort to find effective Alzheimer’s prevention therapies. BAI established and leads the Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative (API), an international collaborative formed to evaluate the most promising therapies as quickly as possible. It includes prevention trials in persons who at particularly high genetic risk, innovative approaches to the evaluation of these treatments using biomarker and cognitive measurements, and registries to promote awareness of and enrollment in these and other studies related to Alzheimer’s prevention.
Through the API, BAI is currently leading two prevention trials – the Autosomal Dominant Alzheimer’s Disease (ADAD) trial in Colombia, and the multisite international Generation Study. The latter is an important complement to the ADAD trial and focuses on cognitively healthy older adults, ages 60 to 75, who are at high risk of developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s at older ages because they inherited two copies of the e4 type of the apolipoprotein (APOE) gene—one from each parent. Additional prevention trials will be launching as part of the API in the future.
To help with recruitment efforts for the Generation Study and other prevention trials, BAI also spearheads the Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry (www.endALZnow.org). The Registry, which has nearly 240,000 members, is an online community designed to recruit and connect people 18 years and older to volunteer to participate in critical prevention research.
BAI was founded in 2006 by Banner Health, one of the country’s largest nonprofit health care systems. It has three over-arching goals: to help find treatments to end Alzheimer’s as soon as possible; to set a national standard of dementia care for patients and family caregivers; and to forge new models of collaboration in biomedical research.
For more information or to support BAI, visit www.banneralz.org/endALZ60.
About Banner Alzheimer’s Institute
Banner Alzheimer’s Institute (BAI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the goal of ending Alzheimer’s disease without losing another generation. It is helping to launch a new era of Alzheimer’s research—detection, treatment and prevention at the pre-symptomatic stage—and to establish a comprehensive model of care that can be the national standard. BAI was founded in 2006 by Phoenix-based Banner Health, one of the country’s largest nonprofit healthcare systems. For more information, go to www.banneralz.org.
About Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative
The Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative (API) is an international collaborative formed to launch a new era of Alzheimer’s prevention research. Led by the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, the API will conduct prevention trials in cognitively healthy people at increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease. It will continue to establish the brain imaging, biological and cognitive measurements needed to rapidly test promising prevention therapies and provide registries to support enrollment in future prevention trials. API is intended to provide the scientific means, accelerated approval pathway and enrollment resources needed to evaluate the range of promising Alzheimer’s prevention therapies and find ones that work without losing another generation. For more information, go to www.banneralz.org.