Bill Gates is going to invest $100
million in the Dementia Discovery Fund to seek treatment for the devastating
brain-wasting disease.
The billionaire Microsoft founder, who
is known for his charitable generosity, said he is ‘excited to be joining the
fight’ against Alzheimer’s. Gates has personally invested $50
million – not through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which he says
will be followed by another $50 million in start-up ventures working in
Alzheimer’s research.
Watch his video, ‘Investing in the Fight
Against Alzheimer’s’ here:
In a blog post on his site, GatesNotes, the businessman said:
The human cost of Alzheimer’s is much
more difficult to put into numbers. It’s a terrible disease that devastates
both those who have it and their loved ones.
This is something I know a lot about,
because men in my family have suffered from Alzheimer’s.
I know how awful it is to watch people
you love struggle as the disease robs them of their mental capacity, and there
is nothing you can do about it.
It feels a lot like you’re experiencing
a gradual death of the person that you knew.
Gates says we have seen ‘scientific
innovation’ turn once-guaranteed killers such as HIV into ‘chronic illnesses
that can be held in check with medication’ and says he believes the ‘same – or
better’ can be done with Alzheimer’s.
Adding:
As a first step, I’ve invested $50
million in the Dementia Discovery Fund—a private fund working to diversify the
clinical pipeline and identify new targets for treatment. Most of the major
pharmaceutical companies continue to pursue the amyloid and tau pathways. DDF
complements their work by supporting startups as they explore less mainstream
approaches to treating dementia.
I’m making this investment on my own,
not through the foundation. The first Alzheimer’s treatments might not come to
fruition for another decade or more, and they will be very expensive at first.
Once that day comes, our foundation might look at how we can expand access in
poor countries.
Gates said he’d spent ‘considerable
time’ over the past year learning about the disease and the progress which has
been made to date.
He said there has already been a ‘lot of
amazing work’ done in the field to delay Alzheimer’s and ‘reduce its cognitive
impact’. Adding he is ‘hopeful’ we can ‘substantially alter the course of
Alzheimer’s if we make progress in five areas’.
The five areas are:
We need to better understand how
Alzheimer’s unfolds.
We need to detect and diagnose
Alzheimer’s earlier
We need more approaches to stopping the
disease.
We need to make it easier to get people
enrolled in clinical trials.
We need to use data better.
He writes:
By improving in each of these areas, I
think we can develop an intervention that drastically reduces the impact of
Alzheimer’s.
There are plenty of reasons to be
optimistic about our chances: our understanding of the brain and the disease is
advancing a great deal. We’re already making progress—but we need to do more.
Gates signed off by saying:
It’s a miracle that people are living so
much longer, but longer life expectancies alone are not enough. People should
be able to enjoy their later years—and we need a breakthrough in Alzheimer’s to
fulfill that.
I’m excited to join the fight and can’t
wait to see what happens next.
Hopefully with Gates funding of further
research, and promotion to raise awareness of the disease, significant progress
in the battle against Alzheimer’s won’t be far away.
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