CSIRO Janssen-Cilag deal
May 23, 2013
THE CSIRO has announced a new
collaborative research project on
Alzheimer’s disease, in partnership
with Janssen-Cilag Pty Ltd.
According to the CSIRO’s Dr Tim
O’Meara, the project will focus on
“validating and developing novel
composite end-points for use in
Alzheimer’s clinical research”.
It will also aim to understand
cognitive and clinical models of
disease progression for subjects
with amyloid burden.
Initially a two-year collaboration,
the move will see scientists from
Janssen-Cilag and CSIRO jointly
supervising a research fellow in a
mathematics and statistics project
“that aims to turn mountains
of data into clinically useful
information that will be used to
help stop or delay the onset of
Alzheimer’s disease”.
The CSIRO says the work is vital
given the strong pharmaceutical
pipeline of a new generation of
therapies for Alzheimer’s disease
which aim to modify the course of
the condition.
Although industry is actively
designing trials targeting the
earliest stages of the disease for
these therapies, there’s currently
a lack of “appropriate outcome
measures for assessing the success
of therapeutic interventions”.
O’Meara said the collaboration
with Janssen-Cilag will study the
trajectories of disease progression
of various markers of the disease,
in order to develop “cognitive and
clinical markers of progression that
sensitively capture change”.
Ageing populations in developed
countries are predicted to see
more than 115 million people with
dementia worldwide by 2050, and
each week there are 1700 new
Alzheimer’s cases diagnosed in
Australia.
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