ALPACA: A Reinforcement Learning Environment for Medication Repurposing and Treatment Optimization in Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Evaluating personalized, sequential treatment strategies for Alzheimer's disease (AD) using clinical trials is often impractical due to long disease horizons and substantial inter-patient heterogeneity. To address these constraints, we present the Alzheimer's Learning Platform for Adaptive Care Agents (ALPACA), an open-source, Gym-compatible reinforcement learning (RL) environment for systematically exploring personalized treatment strategies using existing therapies. ALPACA is powered by the Continuous Action-conditioned State Transitions (CAST) model trained on longitudinal trajectories from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), enabling medication-conditioned simulation of disease progression under alternative treatment decisions. We show that CAST autoregressively generates realistic medication-conditioned trajectories and that RL policies trained in ALPACA outperform no-treatment and behavior-cloned clinician baselines on memory-related outcomes. Interpretability analyses further indicated that the learned policies relied on clinically meaningful patient features when selecting actions. Overall, ALPACA provides a reusable in silico testbed for studying individualized sequential treatment decision-making for AD.