Alzheimer's Disease Biomarker Observatory · UNLV

Every Alzheimer's trial. Every biomarker. Every day.

We follow the drug trials, the biomarkers they rely on and the research behind them — updated daily and explorable with AI. Scroll to see how.

Start the story Go to the tools Find a trial near you

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Studies mirrored

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Active Alzheimer's drug trials

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Papers & news indexed

01 · The disease

Alzheimer's starts years before anyone notices

The brain changes long before memory does. Biomarkers are how we see those changes — and how trials pick the right people and tell whether a drug works.

Biomarker levelAT(N) framework

decades before symptomstime →

Amyloid comes first. Sticky amyloid-β plaques build up silently, often more than a decade before symptoms. A blood test or amyloid PET scan can detect them.

Then tau spreads. Tangles of tau protein follow, moving through the brain in a predictable pattern that tracks how the disease advances.

Neurons are lost. Neurodegeneration shows up as brain shrinkage on MRI and as neurofilament light (NfL) in blood.

Only then do symptoms appear. By the time memory and thinking decline, much damage is done. That's why trials now use the AT(N) biomarkers — Amyloid, Tau, Neurodegeneration — to act earlier.

Biomarker levelAT(N) framework

decades before symptomstime →

02 · The trials

From the world's trial registry to the Alzheimer's pipeline

Our Clinical Trials Observatory mirrors ClinicalTrials.gov every day, then narrows it down to the trials that matter for Alzheimer's.

ClinicalTrials.gov studies mirrored

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ClinicalTrials.gov studies mirrored—

Tracked trials (Alzheimer's & related brain diseases)—

Active Alzheimer's drug-pipeline trials—

Bar lengths on a log scale.

— studies — the whole ClinicalTrials.gov registry, mirrored and refreshed daily, with every version of every record kept.

— tracked trials: Alzheimer's and related brain diseases, checked on ClinicalTrials.gov every day.

— active drug trials make up today's Alzheimer's pipeline — testing — drugs and seeking about — participants.

Most of the pipeline sits in Phase 2, where drugs first show whether they work. We track how every trial changes over time — — registration changes classified so far.

Explore pipeline trends

ClinicalTrials.gov studies mirrored

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ClinicalTrials.gov studies mirrored—

Tracked trials (Alzheimer's & related brain diseases)—

Active Alzheimer's drug-pipeline trials—

Bar lengths on a log scale.

03 · The biomarkers

Biomarkers now shape most Alzheimer's trials

Which biomarkers trials use — to enrol people, to measure effects — is exactly what the observatory was built to watch.

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use a biomarker to choose who can join

Each square = 1% of trials · Active Alzheimer's drug trials, live

Most of active pipeline trials use a biomarker in their eligibility criteria — for example requiring a positive amyloid scan or blood test to join.

Many measure a biomarker as a primary outcome: the trial succeeds or fails partly on how a biomarker moves.

Across all active Alzheimer's drug trials, our 2026 analysis found biomarkers in 84% — peaking at 91% in Phase 2.

Read the paper

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use a biomarker to choose who can join

Each square = 1% of trials · Active Alzheimer's drug trials, live

04 · The research

Connecting what researchers publish to the trials that test it

alzPatrol gathers research papers and news every day and reads them for biomarkers.

Papers & newsBiomarkersTrials

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papers & articles

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sources

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links to trials

— research papers and — news articles, collected every day from dozens of sources — PubMed plus industry, research and press sites.

Each one is scanned for biomarkers with our curated biomarker list and an AI model trained on medical research, so you can search the literature by biomarker rather than by keyword.

— links connect papers and news to the clinical trials they discuss — so from a trial you can see its evidence, and from a paper, its trials.

Browse research

Papers & newsBiomarkersTrials

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papers & articles

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sources

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links to trials

05 · The answers

Ask a hard question. A team of AI agents does the reading.

alzChat Deep Research turns a multi-part question into a cited answer drawn from papers, news and trials.

Papers using plasma p-tau217 to detect amyloid with AUC > 0.9 — and which trials use it for eligibility?

Planner

breaks the question down

Retriever

finds the right papers

Extractors ×N

read each paper, pull out the numbers

Filter

applies your threshold

Trials agent

matches the trials

Synthesizer

answer with sources

Answerexample from a real run, Oct 2026

18 studies report AUC above 0.9 for plasma p-tau217 against amyloid PET; 12 active trials list p-tau217 in their eligibility criteria…

📄 BioFINDER-2📄 ALZpath🧬 NCT05891496🧬 NCT07589595

Ask in plain language — including thresholds and cross-references that a search box can't handle.

A planner splits the question, a retriever finds candidate papers, and extractors work in parallel through the full text to pull out the numbers you asked for.

Results are filtered, matched to trials, and written up as an answer where every claim links back to its source.

Try Deep Research

Papers using plasma p-tau217 to detect amyloid with AUC > 0.9 — and which trials use it for eligibility?

Planner

breaks the question down

Retriever

finds the right papers

Extractors ×N

read each paper, pull out the numbers

Filter

applies your threshold

Trials agent

matches the trials

Synthesizer

answer with sources

Answerexample from a real run, Oct 2026

18 studies report AUC above 0.9 for plasma p-tau217 against amyloid PET; 12 active trials list p-tau217 in their eligibility criteria…

📄 BioFINDER-2📄 ALZpath🧬 NCT05891496🧬 NCT07589595

Who it's for

Built for everyone working against Alzheimer's

Patients & families

Find one near you, understand trial phases, and see the science working for you.

Explore →

Industry researchers

Curated biomarker intelligence and AI tools to help design smarter, evidence-based clinical trials.

Explore →

Collaborators

Contribute annotations, extend coverage to new diseases, and help build the biomarker map with us.

Explore →

The platform

Every tool, in one place

Research tools need a free account — sign in or register

Clinical Trials Observatory

A daily mirror of the whole ClinicalTrials.gov registry, focused on Alzheimer's and related brain diseases: the trials we track daily, change reports, and interactive pipeline trends.

Trials Reports Trends Databases

alzPatrol

Research papers and news from dozens of sources, scanned for biomarkers and linked to the trials they discuss.

News Research Sources

alzChat Deep Research

Ask a multi-part question; agents search papers, news and trials, extract metrics from full text and write a cited answer.

alzQuery

Enter any trial's ID to see which biomarkers it uses, found by AI and our biomarker matcher and grouped as amyloid, tau or neurodegeneration.

alzAnalysis

Analyses and batch tools: the CTO-BMO question set, the eligibility & outcomes scraper and the anti-tree filter.

CTO-BMO1 Eligibility Scraper Anti-Tree

ADBMO

The Biomarker Observatory home: the interactive biomarker tree, publications, team, and a site map of every page.

Biomarker Tree Site Map

Tree Editors

Curate the biomarker list: the production tree for AI annotation and the ad-hoc tree for the string matcher.

Production Ad-hoc

Games

Eight short quizzes on drugs, trials and clinical signs, with a leaderboard. No sign-in needed.

Our research

Published from the observatory

2026

Biomarkers in Alzheimer's disease clinical trials: 2025

Biomarkers appear in 84% of active Alzheimer's drug trials — as inclusion criteria in 58% and as primary outcomes in 36%, peaking in Phase 2 (91%).

Alzheimer's & Dementia: TRCI (2026) →2025

Alzheimer's disease drug development pipeline: 2025

138 drugs in 182 trials — 31 agents in Phase 3, 75 in Phase 2, 45 in Phase 1; biomarkers are primary outcomes in 27% of trials.

Alzheimer's & Dementia: TRCI (2025) →AAIC 2025

ADBMO: the Alzheimer's Disease Biomarker Observatory

An AI-assisted platform that continuously monitors biomarker use across trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov.

Alzheimer's & Dementia, AAIC 2025 abstract →

Background

Understanding Alzheimer's

Open any topic for the essentials.

What is Alzheimer's disease?

Alzheimer's disease is a progressive brain disease and the most common cause of dementia. Abnormal proteins build up in the brain, killing nerve cells and causing memory and thinking to decline.

It typically progresses from mild memory loss to difficulty with daily activities. Finding it early with biomarkers gives treatment the best chance to help.

Causes & risk factors

Genetics: mutations in APP, PSEN1 and PSEN2 cause early-onset Alzheimer's; the APOE-ε4 gene variant raises the risk of late-onset Alzheimer's.

Age: the greatest risk factor — prevalence doubles every 5 years after 65.

Other factors: cardiovascular health, education, traumatic brain injury, lifestyle and other health conditions.

Core & emerging biomarkers

A — Amyloid-β: Aβ42/40 in spinal fluid (CSF) or blood; amyloid PET scans
T — Tau: p-tau in spinal fluid or blood; tau PET scans
N — Neurodegeneration: total tau, NfL, brain shrinkage on MRI

Emerging: blood tests for p-tau217 and p-tau181; inflammatory YKL-40, sTREM2, GFAP; synaptic neurogranin; FDG-PET, fMRI, DTI and digital cognitive tests.

Current research

Therapies target amyloid (lecanemab, donanemab), tau, neuroinflammation, synaptic function and more; blood-based diagnostics, precision medicine and multi-domain lifestyle programmes are growing fast.

See the live pipeline in CTO Trends

Is there a cure?

Not yet. Cholinesterase inhibitors (donepezil, rivastigmine) and memantine ease symptoms; anti-amyloid antibodies modestly slow decline in early disease.

A cure will need a deeper understanding of disease mechanisms, earlier detection and combination therapies that act on several pathways.

Challenges in clinical trials

Recruitment: finding early-stage participants who need biomarker screening.
Variability: Alzheimer's differs between people, making uniform outcomes hard.
Outcomes: slow progression demands long trials with sensitive measures.
Biomarker requirements narrow eligible populations; over 99% of Alzheimer's drug trials have historically failed; trials run 18–36 months; placebo use and consent raise ethical questions.

Field milestones

FDA approves donanemab (2024)

The second anti-amyloid antibody for early Alzheimer's (35% slowing of decline in Phase 3), joining lecanemab.

Blood tests come of age (2024)

A blood test for p-tau217 detects the brain changes of Alzheimer's with over 90% accuracy; the Alzheimer's Association has issued guidance for blood biomarkers in specialist care.

A more diverse pipeline (2025)

Disease-targeted therapies now target 15 different disease processes — led by neurotransmitter receptors (22%), amyloid (18%) and neuroinflammation (17%); 33% of agents are repurposed.

Lifestyle interventions (2023–2024)

FINGER-style multi-domain programmes (diet, exercise, cognitive training) reduce dementia risk in at-risk people.

For the latest news, see alzPatrol.

Research agenda & funding

The Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) funds the Biomarker Observatory — a first-of-its-kind initiative led by Dr. Jeffrey Cummings (UNLV) and Dr. Feixiong Cheng (Cleveland Clinic), complementing the ADDF Diagnostics Accelerator ($60M+ in 70+ projects since 2018).

National Plan to Address Alzheimer's Disease (NIH/HHS): research funding above $3.5B a year, faster translation, better recruitment and diversity, more data sharing.

Key initiatives: ADNI, AMP-AD, DIAN-TU, LEADS, ACTC.

Partners

The people behind it

Chambers-Grundy Center for Transformative Neuroscience

Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF)

See the pipeline for yourself

Create a free account to explore every trial, biomarker and paper — or start with the public quizzes.