Between 12-13 November, IPECAD (International Pharmaco-Economic Collaboration on Alzheimer’s Disease) hosted its 9th annual conference, which was organised at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Glasgow, immediately after the ISPOR Europe conference. IPECAD is a multi-stakeholder collaboration of academic health economists, government and HTA analysts, and industry health-economics teams working to improve mathematical and decision-analytic models for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Its members develop and share open-source health-economic frameworks, supporting transparent reimbursement and value-assessment decisions. Our Director for Research, Angela Bradshaw, joined the IPECAD conference and delivered a presentation together with her counterpart at Alzheimer Scotland.
The 9th IPECAD conference addressed key health-economic challenges surrounding emerging Alzheimer’s disease (AD) treatments. Sessions covered global cost-effectiveness evidence, methodological constraints in HTA for disease-modifying therapies, and new long-term outcome models for agents such as lecanemab. Further discussions examined real-world evidence infrastructures, registry-based reimbursement models, and managed access agreements. Advanced modelling work was showcased on price-threshold analyses across 174 countries, NICE extrapolation strategies, model comparison initiatives, and register-linked survival modelling. Microsimulation pitches highlighted functional-cognitive linkage, prevention impacts, and country-specific cost-effectiveness constraints. Additional sessions discussed cost-effectiveness modelling for diagnostic-treatment combinations, including blood-based biomarkers and imaging diagnostics. One session was focused on challenges in understanding and measuring costs relating to informal care, covering burdens for individual caregivers as well as system-level costs.
Angela and Alison McKean (Director for Research and Policy at Alzheimer Scotland) jointly presented on healthcare system preparedness and societal perspectives on anti-amyloid therapies, from European and Scottish viewpoints. Angela summarised Alzheimer Europe’s position statement on anti-amyloid therapies, while Alison described their engagement with regulators and HTA bodies to represent the views of people affected by dementia. Alison also highlighted Brain Health Scotland’s work, including brain health and dementia resource centres and wider initiatives supporting population brain health. Learn more about IPECAD: http://www.ipecad.org/