Skip to main content
Premium Trial:

Request an Annual Quote

Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, FINGERS Brain Health Institute Partner to Prevent, Treat Alzheimer's

NEW YORK – The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) and the FINGERS Brain Health Institute (FBHI) announced on Wednesday plans to jointly provide the infrastructure and resources to advance Alzheimer's disease prevention and treatment studies.

Under the Precision Prevention Partnership, ADDF and FBHI will expand the ongoing multisite MET-FINGER clinical study while exploring drug repositioning possibilities. They will also advance the development and commercialization of an Alzheimer's-related app, pursue clinical trial collaborations with pharmaceutical companies, and improve Alzheimer's diagnostics by developing new biomarkers of aging.

The main goal within the collaboration is to improve physicians' ability to combine lifestyle interventions and therapeutics into "precision prevention" programs that factor in patients' individual risk and biomarker profiles and advance strategies for hindering Alzheimer's onset.

These prevention approaches stem from the findings in the ongoing Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) clinical study, which has demonstrated a positive impact of lifestyle interventions such as diet, physical activity, cognitive training, social activity, and regular monitoring of cardiovascular risk factors. The study is being conducted by multiple Swedish and Finnish universities and is led by Miia Kivipelto, the scientific founder and medical and scientific director at the FBHI, and an ADDF board member.

"The FINGER study proves lifestyle interventions can effectively contribute to the prevention of Alzheimer's, but there is the potential to provide even more cognitive benefits through adding therapeutic interventions to the FINGER model," Kivipelto said in a statement. One such therapeutic intervention is metformin, which is being tested alongside lifestyle interventions in the MET-FINGER study launched earlier this year.

Metformin was originally approved to combat type 2 diabetes and later discovered to play a role in reducing Alzheimer's risk. The collaborators plan to expand the MET-FINGER clinical trial platform globally and seek out other drug repurposing possibilities in addition to metformin.

"With this new collaboration," Kivipelto said, "our two organizations will redefine the prevention landscape by targeting several risk factors simultaneously to get optimal preventive effects against Alzheimer's disease."

The collaborators didn't disclose the financial and other specifics of the partnership.