A new European research and innovation programme, ACCESS-AD, has been launched under the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) with the objective of improving timely diagnosis, treatment and long-term management of Alzheimer’s disease across Europe. The five-year initiative responds to growing recognition that recent scientific advances in Alzheimer’s disease are not yet being translated consistently into routine clinical practice.

ACCESS-AD is co-led by Amsterdam UMC, Siemens Healthineers, King’s College London and Gates Ventures. The consortium includes 30 partners from across Europe, spanning academia, healthcare providers, patient organisations, medical technology companies and the pharmaceutical sector. With a total budget of more than €37 million, ACCESS-AD aims to address structural barriers that currently limit access to timely diagnosis and treatment, particularly as disease-modifying therapies become available.

The project focuses on developing and validating an integrated, scalable framework for Alzheimer disease care, combining brain imaging, blood-based biomarkers, digital tools and artificial intelligence–supported clinical decision-making. A cornerstone of ACCESS-AD is its pan-European AD registry, which will leverage the established InRAD platform. ACCESS-AD will collect real-world data from more than 500 patients across a variety of health systems, capturing safety, clinical evolution and treatment outcomes under routine clinical conditions. The registry will also support a pilot study that tests the feasibility of combining DMTs with a multicomponent lifestyle intervention and advanced nutritional supplements from Nestlé, as well as a clinical prediction study of the once-daily oral therapy, blarcamesine.

Through these and other activities, ACCESS-AD will support healthcare systems in delivering earlier diagnosis, equitable treatments, and more consistent follow-up, including outside major specialist centres, while ensuring patient safety and clinical robustness.

Our co-Lead, Niranjan Bose, is also co-leading the ACCESS-AD project. Building on its work to enable secure, federated access to large-scale, high-quality datasets, EPND will support ACCESS-AD in linking clinical, imaging and biomarker data across countries, leveraging the EPND Hub to help generate evidence that can inform changes to routine clinical practice in Alzheimer's disease.

Congratulations to the ACCESS-AD consortium!

You can read more about the project here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1112308