A key challenge in developing better ADRD therapies is lack of effective measures that reflect patient experience and impact of new interventions on symptoms. Validated in 1984, ADAS-Cog is the gold standard for assessing efficacy of dementia treatments despite being developed to assess more advanced stage patients, providing low-resolution snapshots of symptoms, and placing significant burden on patients and carepartners to visit sites for testing. As scientific underpinnings of ADRD advance, early detection and treatment have become paramount to optimize management and effective disease modifying treatments, accelerating the need for upleveled measurement.  

Digital data from sensors provides an objective, comprehensive, and precise understanding of patient experience. These technologies are ubiquitous and increasingly used for continuous, high resolution  monitoring of health. Combined with data science approaches, digital data deepen our understanding of lived experiences of patients, providing an unprecedented opportunity to quantify disease in a patient-centered way. 

This project is a pre-competitive collaboration of pharma, biotech, healthtech and non-profits who will identify  a set of ADRD core measures that bring consensus, consistency, and effectiveness to drug development and clinical care. By demonstrating global meaningful aspects of health for ADRD patients, mapping technology capabilities to what matters most to patients, and building consensus around a priority set of core measures, the team will deliver the field’s defining digital clinical core measure set for ADRD drug development. 

The implications of the downstream impacts of this resource are profound given the absence of any effective disease modifying therapies, complexity of the conditions, imperative of early diagnosis, and the lack of patient ability in some cases to reliably report how they are feeling. Such an advance in ADRD digital clinical measures will support program and system level improvements, revenue opportunities, risk mitigation and cost reduction strategies to support discovery and development of novel therapies targeting dementia.