SLN January

Seven Lakes News January Edition Page 5
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Will $100 Million From Bill Gates
Solve Alzheimer’s Disease?
The Microsoft founder thinks
it’s time for a drastic change in
the race to cure one of the top
killers of Americans. Microsoft
founder Bill Gates announced
that he would be donating $100
million dollars toward Alzheimer’s
research. The donation
will be invested immediately,
with $50 million going toward
the Dementia Discovery Fund,
a British venture capital fund,
and the remaining $50 million
funneled to startup ventures
working toward finding a cure
to Alzheimer’s. That’s a lot of
money, even from a billionaire
like Gates. But it can be hard to
wrap your head around $100
million, and it’s fair to wonder
exactly how this will help in the
fight against the disease, which
is characterized by deteriorating
cognitive function and the complete
loss of memory.
The disease has no cure—yet.
Gates wrote in a post on Gates-
Notes that he was inspired to
invest toward finding a cure for
Alzheimer’s after several members
of his family fell ill to the
disease. It’s also extremely
expensive to treat Alzheimer’s,
Gates noted. “I first became interested
in Alzheimer’s because
of its costs—both emotional
and economic—to families and
healthcare systems,” he wrote.
“The financial burden of the disease
is much easier to quantify.
A person with Alzheimer’s or another
form of dementia spends
five times more every year outof-pocket
on healthcare than a
senior without a neurodegenerative
condition…
But does money help solve
seemingly insurmountable
diseases? When it comes to
Alzheimer’s, the answer is a
resounding yes, according to
Harry Johns, the CEO of the Alzheimer’s
Association.
“The biggest problem in the drug
pipeline is that we have histori-
cally too little investment,” he
said, prior to human testing,
which takes years and millions
to achieve before any drug can
even apply for recognition by the
FDA. That’s why, despite over
400 drug trials in the last 15
years, there’s been zero treatments.
“We need to stop progression,
even potentially stopping it before
symptoms occur,” Johns
said, saying gene therapy could
be one way to consider the treatment
of the incurable disease.
“We can potentially hold off the
impact of the disease. We need
a variety of approaches for innovative
treatments, but we don’t
have one thing that works.”
Gates’ donation is going into a
“private-public research partnership,”
and that’s important
to note because the current
model of relying only on government-funded
initiatives is simply
not working. The natural pipeline
for science and research
has always relied on universities
but Gates is looking to startups
to think about the problem with
fresh eyes, including considering
how the brain and immune
system communicate through
lymphatic vessels, which carry a
fluid that fight foreign particles
while also clearing out cellular
trash. Research published just
last month suggests a failure in
lymphatic vessels could be the
commonality between Alzheimer’s
patients.
“We’re making sufficient progress,
but we need to get to
those outcomes sooner rather
than later,” Johns said. “More
than 5.5 million people have
this disease”—and every minute,
another person develops.
For Alzheimer’s patients,
Gates’ investment might be the
game-changer they’ve been
waiting for.
Edited By Millie Jameson