-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
A-I
J-Z
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
Regions
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
-
Middle East & Africa
-
Americas
-
Asia & Oceania
-
Europe
Europe
- Adriatic
- Belgium
- Bulgaria
- Czech Republic
- Deutschland
- España
- France
- Greece
- Hungary
- Ireland
- Israel
- Italia
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more -
Middle East & Africa
EMEA Thought Leadership
Developing IQVIA’s positions on key trends in the pharma and life sciences industries, with a focus on EMEA.
Learn more
SOLUTIONS
-
Research & Development
-
Real World Evidence
-
Commercialization
-
Safety & Regulatory Compliance
-
Technologies
LIFE SCIENCE SEGMENTS
HEALTHCARE SEGMENTS
- Information Partner Services
- Financial Institutions
- Public Health and Government
- Patient Associations
- Payers
- Providers
THERAPEUTIC AREAS
- Cardiovascular
- Cell and Gene Therapy
- Central Nervous System
- GI & Hepatology
- Infectious Diseases and Vaccines
- Oncology
- Pediatrics
- Rare Diseases
- View All
Impacting People's Lives
"We strive to help improve outcomes and create a healthier, more sustainable world for people everywhere.
LEARN MORE
Harness the power to transform clinical development
Reimagine clinical development by intelligently connecting data, technology, and analytics to optimize your trials. The result? Faster decision making and reduced risk so you can deliver life-changing therapies faster.
Research & Development OverviewResearch & Development Quick Links
Real World Evidence. Real Confidence. Real Results.
Generate and disseminate evidence that answers crucial clinical, regulatory and commercial questions, enabling you to drive smarter decisions and meet your stakeholder needs with confidence.
REAL WORLD EVIDENCE OVERVIEWReal World Evidence Quick Links
See markets more clearly. Opportunities more often.
Elevate commercial models with precision and speed using AI-driven analytics and technology that illuminate hidden insights in data.
COMMERCIALIZATION OVERVIEWCommercialization Quick Links
Service driven. Tech-enabled. Integrated compliance.
Orchestrate your success across the complete compliance lifecycle with best-in-class services and solutions for safety, regulatory, quality and medical information.
COMPLIANCE OVERVIEWSafety & Regulatory Compliance Quick Links
Intelligence that transforms life sciences end-to-end.
When your destination is a healthier world, making intelligent connections between data, technology, and services is your roadmap.
TECHNOLOGIES OVERVIEWTechnology Quick Links
CLINICAL PRODUCTS
COMMERCIAL PRODUCTS
COMPLIANCE, SAFETY, REG PRODUCTS
BLOGS, WHITE PAPERS & CASE STUDIES
Explore our library of insights, thought leadership, and the latest topics & trends in healthcare.
DISCOVER INSIGHTSTHE IQVIA INSTITUTE
An in-depth exploration of the global healthcare ecosystem with timely research, insightful analysis, and scientific expertise.
SEE LATEST REPORTS
FEATURED INNOVATIONS
-
IQVIA Connected Intelligence™
-
IQVIA Healthcare-grade AI™
-
Human Data Science Cloud
-
IQVIA Innovation Hub
-
Decentralized Trials
-
Patient Experience powered by Apple
WHO WE ARE
- Our Story
- Our Impact
- Commitment to Public Health
- Code of Conduct
- Environmental Social Governance
- Privacy
- Executive Team
NEWS & RESOURCES
Unlock your potential to drive healthcare forward
By making intelligent connections between your needs, our capabilities, and the healthcare ecosystem, we can help you be more agile, accelerate results, and improve patient outcomes.
LEARN MORE
IQVIA AI is Healthcare-grade AI
Building on a rich history of developing AI for healthcare, IQVIA AI connects the right data, technology, and expertise to address the unique needs of healthcare. It's what we call Healthcare-grade AI.
LEARN MORE
Your healthcare data deserves more than just a cloud.
The IQVIA Human Data Science Cloud is our unique capability designed to enable healthcare-grade analytics, tools, and data management solutions to deliver fit-for-purpose global data at scale.
LEARN MORE
Innovations make an impact when bold ideas meet powerful partnerships
The IQVIA Innovation Hub connects start-ups with the extensive IQVIA network of assets, resources, clients, and partners. Together, we can help lead the future of healthcare with the extensive IQVIA network of assets, resources, clients, and partners.
LEARN MORE
Proven, faster DCT solutions
IQVIA Decentralized Trials deliver purpose-built clinical services and technologies that engage the right patients wherever they are. Our hybrid and fully virtual solutions have been used more than any others.
LEARN MORE
IQVIA Patient Experience Solutions powered by Apple
Empowering patients to personalize their healthcare and connecting them to caregivers has the potential to change the care delivery paradigm. IQVIA and Apple are collaborating to bring this exciting future of personalized care directly to devices patients already have and use.
LEARN MOREWORKING AT IQVIA
Our mission is to accelerate innovation for a healthier world. Together, we can solve customer challenges and improve patient lives.
LEARN MORELIFE AT IQVIA
Careers, culture and everything in between. Find out what’s going on right here, right now.
LEARN MORE
WE’RE HIRING
"Improving human health requires brave thinkers who are willing to explore new ideas and build on successes. Unleash your potential with us.
SEARCH JOBSBlog
A new view of the Alzheimer's brain
Sep 20, 2016
After years of disappointing progress in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) research, we are finally beginning to make breakthroughs that could have a real impact on AD patients, their families, and the healthcare industry at large.
Worldwide, nearly 44 million people now have AD or related dementia, making these conditions the top cause of disabilities in later life. The biopharma industry has invested billions of dollars into research to treat and prevent AD, yet this work has faced many obstacles, including difficulty identifying biomarkers, tracking the disease’s progress in the brain, and recruiting patients to trials while they are still asymptomatic. But in recent years we’ve begun to see breakthroughs that is driving our research in new directions. Many of these accomplishments were highlighted at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in July, where excitement about recent accomplishments was palpable.
One of the most talked about topics in sessions and networking events was advances in understanding tau pathology and the ability to conduct tau imaging in live patients. This has opened up our ability to see how the tau pathology progresses, and to understand the interactions between tau and amyloid pathologies in living patients. Several sessions explored this topic, including a review of a Mayo Clinic study on predictors of regional tau-PET uptake, and another on the association between amyloid and tau accumulations in patients’ brains and its influence on clinical features.
Until very recently, tau imaging was impossible in vivo. With these new tools we will be able to gather new insights about how the disease progresses, which will steer us down new research paths and hopefully lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of this disease. There is a growing consensus in the research community that we need to address both tau and amyloid pathologies to effectively treat AD. These advances will help make that happen.
Recruiting through the GAP
Another topic of ongoing discussion at the event was the challenge of attracting AD patients to trials before they are diagnosed. Past research has shown that once a patient sees a neurologist about their symptoms, the disease is usually too far advanced for preventive treatments. Studies of healthy volunteers at risk of developing AD have shown the presence of amyloid beta sometimes decades before they become symptomatic, which means we have the potential to identify risk factors and develop treatments for patients well before they ever have symptoms – but only if we can recruit these patients to trials.
That is a significant hurdle to overcome. Traditional methods of recruiting, such as working with treating physicians, or reaching out to patient communities obviously won’t work.
In response, sites need to develop more innovative strategies for engaging and evaluating asymptomatic volunteers. Dr. Paul Aisen of the University of Southern California, San Diego explored this topic in his presentation on using run-in data for screen failure reduction, and the work being done with the Global Alzheimer Platform (GAP) to build large “trial-ready cohorts” for pre-clinical/prodromal AD trials. A key component of this project is to create a network of pre-qualified “trial-ready sites” with specific expertise in and uniform processes for the clinical and biomarker assessments required for prevention trials.
The GAP team, which includes academic, industry, advocacy and other Alzheimer’s leaders, have already designed a process of connecting feeder registries and studies to a GAP Registry to capture a variety of data on non-demented individuals interested in trials along with risk scores to support more efficient selection of candidates for in-person biomarker and clinical assessment.
There were also several sessions that reference data from the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN), an international observational study to understand a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease that is caused by a gene mutation, which is being funded by a multiple-year research grant from the National Institute on Aging. In one session, presenters discussed the value of investigating the rarer autosomal-dominantly inherited forms of AD to identify asymptomatic “at risk” individuals prior to the onset of cognitive decline.
Participants also discussed the need for more treatments to address the symptoms of AD, such as agitation, which plague many AD patients. Currently there are very few therapies to alleviate these symptoms leaving patients to use off-label drugs, which may not be as safe and effective as the industry would like. I was excited to hear about several phase 2 and phase 3 trials underway to develop such treatments.
Overall it was a phenomenal event that left me feeling optimistic about the future of AD research and the work being done by colleagues across the industry. We still have a long road ahead, but new breakthroughs are already giving us greater insight and will help guide us in pursuit of a cure.