Letter Boosting translational research on Alzheimer’s disease in Europe: The Innovative Medicine Initiative AD research platform Alzheimer’s disease is becoming one of the most serious societal challenges with the increasing average life expectancy across the globe. The Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) Report “The Global Impact of Dementia 2013–2050” shows convincingly that between now and 2050 there will be a steep increase in the number of Alzheimer patients from currently 44 million patients affected worldwide to 135 million patients in 2050. Alzheimer’s disease will become a societal challenge, not only in the aging societies of the Western world, but also— and even more—in the developing countries. Without a cure or preventative treatment, Alzheimer’s disease will substantially impact the future of entire societies. Developing drugs for Alzheimer’s disease has proven to be an enormous challenge, many candidate drugs have failed at high cost to the pharmaceutical industry and several com- panies have withdrawn from the field. Sharing of risk (and of course rewards and opportunities) between pharmaceutical companies and academic research groups is a way to lower both the entry barrier for the industry and to boost research and innovation in Alzheimer’s disease in a precompetitive environment. The Innovative Medicine Initiative (www.imi. europa.eu), a public-private partnership between the European Union and the pharmaceutical industry association European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA) responded to this combined societal and scientific challenge with a dedicated research program of three highly complementary projects. 1. EMIF (coordinated by Bart Vannieuwenhuyse and Simon Lovestone; EMIF-AD led by Johannes Streffer and Pieter Jelle Visser) Acknowledging the existence of huge volumes of data underutilized for research, the European Medical Information Framework (EMIF, http://www.emif.eu/) was established to facilitate the use of data from research cohorts and population studies and routine care data. EMIF does this first by making data sets more “visible” by cataloguing the metadata or vari- ables collected in these various data sets, second by pooling suitable data sets on a common platform, and third, especially for routine care or “real-world” data, by enabling distributed analysis of huge data sets. EMIF has two use cases: Alz- heimer’s disease and metabolic disease. Both are focused on biomarkers. In the first 18 months EMIF has assembled data sets for research including more than 30,000 participants in the catalog browser, approximately 5000 pooled individual data from five separate cohort studies and data from routine care from up to 50 million Europeans. EMIF supports research on Alzheimer’s disease with a focus on search and validation of biomarkers, on the comparison of diagnostic criteria, and on the exploration of risk factors in relation to therapeutics devel- opment. 2. Aetionomy (coordinated by Duncan McHale and Martin Hofmann-Apitius) The goal of aetionomy is to generate a “mechanism-based taxonomy of Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease”. The project pursues a “Big Data” approach in neurodegener- ative disease research: heterogeneous information is inte- grated into disease models and made available for dedicated mining approaches aimed at identifying disease candidate mechanisms. This program exploits the very large amount of data currently available. The mechanistic context is represented through graph-based modeling of causal and correlative relationships between entities known to play a role in the pathophysiology of AD. In addition, information extracted and abstracted from -omics data and clinical data is integrated into the disease models. Candidate mechanisms identified will be validated in biomaterial banks and a pro- spective cohort. For the Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms, this prospective cohort will be part of the much larger Euro- pean Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia (EPAD) cohort providing an even larger, independent validation cohort. 3. EPAD (coordinated by Serge Van Der Geyten and Craig Ritchie) The EPAD Initiative started in January 2015. It is a 5-year program to create a pan-European platform for the delivery of a standing phase 2 Proof of Concept study for the secondary prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia. Over the last 15 years there have been no phase 3 successes of agents seeking to *Corresponding author. Tel.: 149-2241-14-2802; Fax: 149-2241-14- 2656. E-mail address: martin.hofmann-apitius@scai.fraunhofer.de 1552-5260/Ó 2015 The Alzheimer’s Association. Published by Elsevier Inc. on behalf of the Alzheimer’s Association. Alzheimer’s & Dementia - (2015) 1-2