The Alzheimer Precision Medicine Initiative

Precision medicine (PM) is an evolving scientific renaissance movement implementing key breakthrough technological and scientific advances to overcome the limitations of traditional symptom- and sign-based phenotypic diagnoses and clinical “one-size-fits-all, magic bullet drug development” in these largely heterogeneous target populations. It is a conceptual shift from ineffective treatments for biologically heterogeneous “population averages” to individually-tailored biomarker-guided targeted therapies. PM is defining which therapeutic approach will be the most effective for a specific individual, at a determined disease stage, across multiple medical research fields, including neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry. The launch of the Alzheimer Precision Medicine Initiative (APMI) and its associated cohort program in 2016—facilitated by the academic core coordinating center run by the Sorbonne University Clinical Research Group in Alzheimer Precision Medicine (Sorbonne University GRC n°21 APM)”—is geared at transforming healthcare, conventional clinical diagnostics, and drug development research in Alzheimer’s disease. Ever since the commencement of the APMI, the international interdisciplinary research network has introduced groundbreaking translational neuroscience programs on the basis of agnostic exploratory genomics, systems biology, and systems neurophysiology applying innovative “big data science”, including breakthrough artificial intelligence-based algorithms. Here, we present the scientific breakthrough advances and the pillars of the theoretical and conceptual development leading to the APMI.