Fifty years of continuous Alzheimer’s trial participation is a long time to hold a single thread, and Headlands Research’s Portland site has held one worth noting: contributions to the clinical research behind every FDA-approved class of Alzheimer’s medication brought to market since 1993. That run covers acetylcholinesterase inhibitors like donepezil and rivastigmine, the NMDA antagonist memantine, and the recent wave of anti-amyloid antibodies, including lecanemab and donanemab. For sponsors evaluating site selection in a therapeutic area where patient screening failure rates are high and experienced investigators matter, that longitudinal record is the actual asset being marked here.
The site’s depth traces substantially to one investigator. Dr. Scott Losk, a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist who joined in 1990, has served as principal investigator on more than 75 Alzheimer’s and dementia trials and as sub-investigator on more than 150 CNS studies spanning depression, schizophrenia, migraine, and fibromyalgia. That breadth means the site can carry a sponsor relationship across indication shifts, which matters as Alzheimer’s programs increasingly require co-morbidity screening and overlapping CNS populations.
Headlands Summit, now operating under the broader Headlands Research network, has run more than 500 trials since 1976. The site added a dedicated Memory Health Center to handle dementia and age-related memory conditions as a distinct clinical program, separating that patient population from its general CNS and psychiatric work. The network is also expanding into cardiometabolic territory, with active studies in diabetes, obesity, and vaccines. That diversification matters operationally: sites that run only CNS trials are vulnerable when pipeline cycles thin, and the Portland site is hedging that risk deliberately.
The commercial context gives the expansion some urgency. The anti-amyloid antibody market, currently at roughly $780 million globally and growing at a 21.6% annual rate, is moving fast enough that sites without established amyloid-confirmed patient cohorts will struggle to compete for next-generation trial slots. Headlands Summit’s Memory Health Center positions Portland as one of the sites already holding that infrastructure, rather than building it from scratch when the next sponsor call comes.
Moe Alsumidaie, MBA, MSF, is founder and Chief Editor of Vanguard Publications, which publishes Clinical Trial Vanguard, Pharma Vanguard and BullScope, and Head of Research at CliniBiz. He has two decades in clinical trial operations and data science, with earlier roles at Genentech, Abbott Vascular and Stanford University Medical Center, and is a guest lecturer in clinical trial sciences at Rutgers University.
