NIH Accelerating Medicines Partnership

Public-private partnerships can play a major role in biomedical research, and the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP) is one example. This is a public-private partnership between the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 12 biopharmaceutical and life science companies and 13 non-profit organizations. It has been formed, according to the AMP website, “to transform the current model for developing new diagnostics and treatments by jointly identifying and validating promising biological targets for therapeutics. The ultimate goal is to increase the number of new diagnostics and therapies for patients and reduce the time and cost of developing them.”

The Partnership, managed through the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), enables the NIH and industry partners to share expertise and more than $300 million in resources. The governance structure is designed to enable all participants to contribute and learn from each other. The Partnership runs on the principles of open science, given that all partners agree to make data and analyses from their work with the Partnership publicly accessible. AMP was launched in February 2014 with projects on Alzheimer’s disease, Type 2 diabetes, and autoimmune disorders, and added a project on Parkinson’s Disease in 2018.