[olsen]

One of the greatest challenges facing biomedical sciences in the 21st century is the development of fundamentally better treatments for neurodegenerative diseases... Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, are the initial focus of the Coalition Against Major Diseases.


http://c-path.org/CAMD.cfm
OUR PURPOSE

The CAMD's focus is to develop new tools and methods that can be applied during the development of new treatments for these diseases that have remained beyond the reach of drug discovery and continue to result in added costs for treatment, chronic suffering, and the loss of lives.

CAMD fosters innovative testing methods that lead to increased efficiency, safety, and speed in developing new therapies...

The Coalition will not duplicate efforts already underway in these areas, but will leverage existing data and knowledge, creating consensus on methods which will advance product development, and make these new methods available for public use.



OUR GOALS

The initial goal of CAMD is to define clinical data standards and establish a pooled database of the control groups of pharmaceutical clinical trials in order to develop quantitative disease progression models for both Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. Coalition members also will work together to incorporate ... biomarkers that have the greatest potential to identify patient populations that are most likely to benefit with the lowest risk of harm from new therapies.

Just as importantly, CAMD members will collaborate to gather and submit the evidence necessary for the FDA and EMA to officially designate such tools as "qualified for use" in drug development. These newly qualified tools will be made publicly available for use by scientists and commercial developers.



OUR MEMBERS

CAMD participants are member organizations that include six patient groups, fifteen biopharmaceutical companies, as well as advisors from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), and the National Institute on Aging (NIA):

[paula_w]

i'm glad to see this collaboration. hoping that they will multi-task and not ignore patients or out of the box thinking. CAMre, for example was a one issue collaboration - stem cells.

this collaboration has wonderful potential, but we must be vigilante about being grouped together with alzheimers regarding neurotransmitters.

look forward to what this group will do and how quickly they will do it. we seem to need the computer databases to survive.

paula