On 11 April 2017 the Osaka City University’s Faculty of Medicine and the University of Southern California’s Alzheimer’s Therapeutic Research Institute (ATRI) signed a mutual cooperation agreement in order to establish infrastructure in Japan for the development of medicines for Alzheimer’s disease.

 
Prof. Paul Aisen (Director of USC ATRI) and                           Commemorative group photo
Prof. Kenji Ohata (Dean of the OCU Faculty and
Graduate School of Medicine)

The agreement will allow OCU, which has been developing its AMED project for clinical research on dementia in Japan and ATRI, which is a research institute for Alzheimer's disease treatment in the US, to share their know-how in order to establish infrastructure for clinical research on dementia and stimulate clinical research in this field in Japan. The cooperation will make it possible to set up facilities in Japan equal to those in the United States, which will contribute to an acceleration of global clinical trials.

To celebrate the conclusion of the agreement, the two parties held a forum in the afternoon with the theme ‘The role of academic consortia in AD therapeutic research’, where the current state and future prospects for clinical trials and treatments in Japan and the United States were discussed.