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WASHINGTON D.C.: The US National Institute on Aging, part of the government’s National Institutes of Health, will provide six year’s worth of funding, worth up to $300 million, for a project to create an Alzheimer’s research database.

The database aims to enable researchers to gain new insights on the disease, which affects some 6 million Americans, by monitoring the long-term health of 70 to 90 percent of the US population.

Data from medical records, insurance claims, pharmacies, mobile devices, sensors and various government agencies will be utilized by the platform.

In an interview about the database, Dr. Nina Silverberg, director of the NIA’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers program, said, “Real-world data is what we need to make a lot of decisions about the effectiveness of medications and looking really at a much broader population than most clinical trials can cover,” as quoted by Reuters.

The database will seek to identify healthy people at risk for Alzheimer’s for future drug trials, as well as address the ongoing underrepresentation of people of color and various ethnicities in related clinical trials.

“The system would be built in a secure computing environment with a number of restrictions to ensure the privacy of people’s health data,” Silverberg said.

According to the funding announcement, the project’s earliest start date will be in April 2024.

In an interview, Alzheimer’s Association Chief Science Officer Maria Carrillo said that the organization plans to apply for a platform grant, which will award $50 million a year for up to six years.

Partha Bhattacharyya, chief data officer of the NIH Office of Data Resources and Analytics, said, “We envision this platform will allow researchers to recruit across the US. If we are to play a greater role in prevention, we must start early. That is not at age 65.”