Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a degenerative neurological disease with unclear pathogenesis. The disease progress/trajectory of AD patients can be adequately described by establishing quantitative pharmacological disease progression model. Integrating biomarker information into the model can provide more insight to understand the potential pathological mechanisms and facilitate the optimization of future trial design. Several empirical and semi-mechanism disease progression models have been published. This mini-review is expected to offer some references for the further AD clinical research and new drug development.

Key words: Alzheimer's disease, disease progression model, quantitative pharmacology, modeling and simulation