# Understanding How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Find Better Drug Combinations for Alzheimer’s Disease
Despite decades of intensive research and billions of dollars invested in finding treatments, Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias continue to affect increasing numbers of older adults worldwide. This persistent rise highlights an urgent need for more effective therapies that can actually modify the course of these devastating conditions. This perspective article explores how artificial intelligence (AI) and data science could revolutionize the way combination drug therapies are designed and tested for Alzheimer’s disease.
The article examines how AI can help synthesize the enormous and rapidly expanding amount of medical data now available in the Alzheimer’s field. This includes information from clinical trials, biomarkers (biological indicators of disease), multiple types of biological data (from genes to brain imaging), and real-world patient records. By analyzing these vast datasets, AI tools can help identify which drug combinations might work best together and even predict how effective these combinations could be in clinical trials. The authors bring together insights from multiple disciplines—including clinical trial design, neuropsychiatry, pharmacology, chemistry, and computer science—to show where AI-driven approaches could fill current gaps in treatment development. Particular attention is given to AI-powered network medicine methods, which can identify drug combinations targeting the multiple disease processes that occur together in Alzheimer’s and related conditions.
For patients, families, and healthcare providers, this represents a promising new approach to tackling a condition that has proven extremely difficult to treat with single medications. However, the authors also acknowledge significant challenges in translating these AI-powered discoveries from computer models into actual clinical practice. While this technology offers hope for more rational, data-driven drug development, considerable work remains to ensure these computational predictions translate into safe and effective treatments for older adults living with dementia.
Source Information
Original Title: The role for artificial intelligence in identifying combination therapies for Alzheimer’s disease.
Authors: Cheng F, Sha Z, Zhou Y, Hou Y, Zhang P
Journal: The journal of prevention of Alzheimer’s disease (Oct 2025)
PubMed ID: 41145341
DOI: 10.1016/j.tjpad.2025.100366
This summary was generated using AI to make recent geriatrics and frailty research more accessible. Please refer to the original article for complete details.
