Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative

Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a multisite study that aims to improve clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This cooperative study combines expertise and funding from the private and public sector to study subjects with AD, as well as those who may develop AD and controls with no signs of cognitive impairment. Researchers at 63 sites in the US and Canada track the progression of AD in the human brain with neuroimaging, biochemical, and genetic biological markers. This knowledge helps to find better clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of AD. ADNI has made a global impact, firstly by developing a set of standardized protocols to allow the comparison of results from multiple centers, and secondly by its data-sharing policy which makes available all at the data without embargo to qualified researchers worldwide. To date, over 1000 scientific publications have used ADNI data. A number of other initiatives related to AD and other diseases have been designed and implemented using ADNI as a model. ADNI has been running since 2004 and is currently funded until 2021.400 MCI200 early MCI150 elderly controls133 elderly controls Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) is a multisite study that aims to improve clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). This cooperative study combines expertise and funding from the private and public sector to study subjects with AD, as well as those who may develop AD and controls with no signs of cognitive impairment. Researchers at 63 sites in the US and Canada track the progression of AD in the human brain with neuroimaging, biochemical, and genetic biological markers. This knowledge helps to find better clinical trials for the prevention and treatment of AD. ADNI has made a global impact, firstly by developing a set of standardized protocols to allow the comparison of results from multiple centers, and secondly by its data-sharing policy which makes available all at the data without embargo to qualified researchers worldwide. To date, over 1000 scientific publications have used ADNI data. A number of other initiatives related to AD and other diseases have been designed and implemented using ADNI as a model. ADNI has been running since 2004 and is currently funded until 2021. The idea of a collaboration between public institutions and private pharmaceutical companies to fund a large biomarker project to study AD and to speed up progress toward effective treatments for the disease was conceived at the beginning of the millennium by Neil S. Buckholz at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) and Dr. William Potter, at Eli Lilly and Company. The Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) began in 2004 under the leadership of Dr. Michael W. Weiner, funded as a private – public partnership with $27 million contributed by 20 companies and two foundations through the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and $40 million from the NIA. The initial five-year study (ADNI-1) was extended by two years in 2009 by a Grant Opportunities grant, and in 2011 and 2016 by further competitive renewals of the ADNI-1 grant (ADNI-2 and ADNI-3, respectively) (Table 1). ADNI enrolls participants between the ages of 55 and 90 who are recruited at 57 sites in the US and Canada. One group has dementia due to AD, another group has mild memory problems known as mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and the final control group consists of healthy elderly participants. ADNI-1 initially enrolled 200 healthy elderly, 400 participants with MCI, and 200 participants with AD. ADNI-GO, ADNI-2 and ADNI -3 added additional participants to augment the cohort, for final cohort size of over 1000 participants (Table 1). Table 1: ADNI uses a variety of techniques to study its participants. After obtaining informed consent, participants undergo a series of initial tests that are repeated at intervals over subsequent years (Table 2): Table 2 One defining characteristic of ADNI is the commitment by all participating research groups to share ownership of the data prior to the completion of the research and by collaborators to forgo any patent opportunities. This has been described by the head of the ADNI and data publications committee as 'a radical experiment in open data access'. All data generated by the ADNI study are entered into the data archive hosted at the Laboratory of NeuroImaging (LONI) at the University of Southern California. In 2013, whole genome sequencing data for the entire ADNI cohort were added to the LONI database. Qualified researchers worldwide can access image and clinical data sets that have undergone quality control procedures. To date nearly 1800 applications for data use have been received from investigators in multiple disciplines, and over 7 million brain scan images and clinical data sets have been downloaded. ADNI contributes data to a number of consortia and big data projects which have the potential to unlock many of the mysteries of neurological diseases. It shares imaging and genetic data with the Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium which uses imaging genetics to study 12 major brain diseases including schizophrenia, bipolar disease and depression. The ADNI dataset was also used as the 'test' dataset in the Dialogue on Reverse Engineering Assessment and Methods (DREAM) Alzheimer's disease Big Data Challenge #1 for the discovery of novel predictive AD biomarkers. One measure of the success of this open data sharing approach is the number of scientific publications arising from ADNI data: currently over 1000 and a wide variety of fields including areas outside of Alzheimer's disease. ADNI has developed standardized protocols that allow results from multiple centers both within the study and worldwide to be directly compared. These include methods for the acquisition and quality control of both MRI and PET scans on scanners differing in the vendor, software platform, and field strength, and also for the analysis of CSF biomarkers. The standardized methods are now used by pharmaceutical companies, and in clinical trials of preventive and disease modifying AD treatments.