What if a new partnership model could reduce costs and improve outcomes for patients and health systems alike?
In the Asia-Pacific region — like much of the world — cases of complex neurological disease are soaring. Rapidly ageing populations are driving an estimated prevalence of 71 million people with Alzheimer’s alone in Asia-Pacific by 20501. Of those, up to 90% will remain undiagnosed2.
And without early detection, patients miss the window for effective treatment and life planning. This drives up long-term care costs. Direct spending on neurological conditions by households and payers globally has risen by 5.5% since 2000 to $1.1 trillion3; a looming public health crisis awaits. Diagnostic insights are therefore vital to manage the threat to our health systems.
Yet health systems currently rely on high-cost, centralised tools like PET scans, which lack the scalability our region’s changing demographics require. Access is generally limited to high-resource urban settings4.
Public-Private Partnerships improve access and equity in diagnostics
No single entity can solve this problem alone. It requires a shift in approach: from transactional buyer/supplier relationships to strategic Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs).
Neurology and Oncology are distinct disease areas with different challenges, but the principles of successful partnership established in cancer care offer a valuable roadmap. By looking at how PPPs have solved access barriers in Oncology, we can see how industry and government might collaborate to remove barriers to scalable, life-saving diagnostics for Alzheimer’s.
1. Funding
Sustainable access models: reducing health system friction through collaboration.
The ARiSE local patient support programme (PSP) is a prime example of how partnership can alleviate financial and administrative burdens. Launched in 2016 with the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS), ARiSE moved beyond traditional “free goods” models to provide financial subsidies, reducing patient out-of-pocket spend by an average of 80% and significantly easing the administrative workload for hospital pharmacies.
While the specific funding structures used in oncology may not be directly transferrable to neurology, the collaborative mindset is essential. In the neuro space, the barrier is often the cost and accessibility of diagnostic tools. Our aspiration is to work with payers and health authorities to co-create sustainable reimbursement structures specifically for early diagnosis. Just as ARiSE solved a friction point in cancer treatment, we must partner to ensure that innovative diagnostic tools for Alzheimer’s are reimbursed and accessible, preventing cost from becoming a barrier to detection.
2. Decentralised care
An estimated 53 million family members, friends and neighbours globally are currently providing care for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias5. This care is demanding and complex.
In oncology, Roche partnered with the National University Cancer Institute, Singapore (NCIS) and NCCS to deliver care in patients’ homes. This was enabled by new subcutaneous formulations and partnerships with providers like Jaga-Me, a Singapore-based mobile medical and home care provider (named from the Malay word ‘Jaga’ — ‘to guard’).
Adapting this decentralised framework could transform how we approach diagnostic monitoring and ongoing care in neurology. By shifting capacity from congested hospitals to community settings, we can provide dementia patients with the consistent environment they need. The goal is to create a health system infrastructure capable of diagnosing and monitoring patients where they are most comfortable.
3. Precision medicine
Despite more than 75% of the world’s population being of Asian or African ancestry, most human genetic association studies have been undertaken in populations of European ancestry6.
This presents a particular challenge in Alzheimer’s research. Genetic risk factors vary between ancestries. More than 80 different genetic variants have been identified for late‐onset Alzheimer’s disease to date, but study populations have been largely of European ancestry and from high income countries — to the detriment of Asian and African ancestries, and low and middle‐income countries (where more than 60% of dementia cases occur)7.
The “Precision Oncology” study — a partnership between Roche, the Singapore Translational Cancer Consortium (STCC), NCCS, and NCIS — shows how we can close this gap. This partnership is building a consented clinico-genomic database (CGDB) in Singapore to yield better patient outcomes, supported by Roche-subsidised genomic tests.
To enable accurate early diagnosis for Asian populations, we need similar data infrastructure for the brain. We aspire to replicate this approach to research — bringing public and private sectors together to co-create clinico-genomic databases specifically for Alzheimer’s. This is the first step to improving our genetic understanding of the disease and ensuring diagnostics are developed for the populations they serve.
4. Education
Finally, improvements in infrastructure, funding, and data will only succeed if we address the human factor: the widespread stigma and lack of awareness that prevent patients from seeking help in the first place.
The Asia-Pacific region faces specific challenges in Alzheimer’s awareness including a cultural context in many economies that denies its existence or attaches stigma, or an assumption that Alzheimer’s is a natural part of ageing and not a disease1.
Public-Private Partnerships can break this cycle. The public sector holds the trust and reach of the community, while the private sector holds the deep disease insight and data to create effective messaging.
The commitment to collaboration
The path to managing the Alzheimer’s crisis depends on a “whole-of-society” approach that prioritises long-term system resilience over short-term transactions.
By replicating successful partnership models — leveraging shared financial risk, community-based care delivery, and localised genetic research — we can dismantle the barriers to early diagnosis. With strategic collaboration, we can transform healthcare from a reactive system into a proactive one. We can ensure that as our population grows and ages, our health infrastructure remains capable of delivering gold-standard care to every patient, regardless of who or where they are.
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