UCSD - University of California - San Diego

10/21/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 10/21/2026 11:06

UC San Diego Joins ARPA-H-Funded Initiative to Launch Drug-Testing Platform for Alzheimer’s Disease

Published Date

October 21, 2026

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Researchers from the University of California San Diego will join a collaboration as part of a federal award of up to $41 million to launch a national effort aimed at accelerating the search for treatments that could prevent or slow Alzheimer's disease. Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and led by The McCance Center for Brain Health at Mass General Brigham, the initiative will establish a clinical trial platform capable of testing multiple combinations of natural products, repurposed FDA-approved drugs and other potential therapies simultaneously.

"Finding effective ways to prevent or slow Alzheimer's disease requires us to rethink how we conduct clinical trials," said Judy Pa, PhD, professor of neurosciences, Shiley Endowed Chair of Alzheimer's Disease Research and director of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study (ADCS) at UC San Diego School of Medicine. "This initiative will allow us to use our highly skilled network of clinical trial sites to accelerate patient recruitment using an innovative blood biomarker-driven approach with natural products and repurposed medicines. By creating a shared system that can evaluate several potential treatments at once, we hope to move the most promising approaches forward more quickly."

Judy Pa, PhD, professor of neurosciences, Shiley Endowed Chair of Alzheimer's disease research and director of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

The four-year project, titled "Platform Trial for Biomarker-Guided Alzheimer's Disease Prevention," will be led by Principal Investigator Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, the Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology and director of the McCance Center for Brain Health within the Mass General Brigham Neuroscience Institute, together with Gene Bowman, ND, MPH, McCance Center clinical trials director and assistant professor of neurology.

"Alzheimer's disease therapies are often evaluated too late in the disease progression, after substantial neurodegeneration has already occurred," said Tanzi. "This program aims to start interventions earlier, identify the most promising therapies rapidly, and, ultimately, uncover strategies to prevent progression before neurodegeneration begins."

A platform trial is designed to overcome some of these limitations by allowing researchers to evaluate several treatments within the same clinical trial infrastructure rather than creating a new trial from scratch for every therapy. The Alzheimer's platform is expected to test five to 10 treatment regimens, allowing researchers to stop testing approaches that do not show sufficient promise while advancing those that do. The goal is to reduce duplicated work and shorten the time needed to determine which potential therapies warrant larger studies.

The McCance Center selected UC San Diego's ADCS as a collaborator due to their strong clinical site network. Together, investigators will work to establish and operate the infrastructure supporting the multi-site studies. The ADCS is a national clinical trials consortium focused on developing and testing treatments for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

The UC San Diego team will help coordinate participating clinical trial sites and standardize how studies are conducted across the network. Its responsibilities include supporting a common study protocol and data collection methods, site selection and activation, and oversight of consistent collection and handling of blood samples used to measure biological signs of Alzheimer's disease. Pa and Howard Feldman, MD, professor of neurosciences at UC San Diego School of Medicine, will support the platform's design through the UC San Diego Epstein Family Alzheimer's Research Collaboration.

"This award reflects the unique strengths of UC San Diego's translational neuroscience community," said Barbara Jung, MD, associate vice chancellor and dean of UC San Diego School of Medicine. "Preventing Alzheimer's requires national collaboration and a commitment to innovation and we are proud that Pa, Feldman and the ADCS team will lead the national clinical trial infrastructure for this ARPA-H initiative on behalf of UC San Diego School of Medicine."

Rather than waiting for changes in memory or thinking to determine whether a treatment may be working, researchers will use blood-based biomarkers - measurable biological signs of disease - to look for changes associated with Alzheimer's disease. The primary biomarker will be p-tau217, a form of the tau protein that can be measured in blood and is associated with Alzheimer's disease-related changes in the brain. Researchers will also examine other blood biomarkers associated with amyloid plaques, inflammation and damage to nerve cells.

Participants will include people who have no cognitive impairment or mild impairment but whose biomarkers indicate early Alzheimer's-related changes. By studying people earlier in the disease process, researchers hope to identify treatments that can intervene before extensive brain damage occurs.

The platform will initially evaluate combinations drawn from natural products and FDA-approved drugs already used for other purposes, as well as treatment combinations identified with the help of artificial intelligence. Researchers will use laboratory findings, existing information about safety and other evidence to prioritize which combinations move into human testing.

The project is designed to ultimately operate across 20 clinical trial sites. By the end of the four-year effort, investigators aim to have biomarker and safety data for five to 10 treatment regimens and identify the strongest candidates for larger, confirmatory clinical trials.

The platform builds on the model of clinical trials that have been used to accelerate therapeutic research for other neurological diseases. By creating a reusable national infrastructure for Alzheimer's prevention studies, researchers hope the initiative will continue to support the evaluation of new treatment candidates beyond the initial ARPA-H-funded project.

Disclaimer: This research was, in part, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.

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