The Dementia Discovery Fund welcomes Bill Gates’ second investment in Alzheimer’s research. Bill is joining Leonard Lauder, ADDF, the Dolby family, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, and other donors, in committing more than $30 million to help launch Diagnostics Accelerator, a venture fund aimed at accelerating bold new ideas for earlier and better diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Diagnosis Accelerator is a project of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), which has identified one of the key barriers to the development of a disease-modifying treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. Currently, there is an insufficient toolbox of biomarkers to easily and more specifically screen and diagnose patients, stage disease progression, monitor response to treatment, and improve the rigor and efficiency of clinical trials. Across diseases, clinical trials are twice as likely to succeed when patients are selected using validated biomarkers. In cancer, validated biomarkers have transformed drug development and clinical practice over the last decade. Now is the time to develop this strategy for Alzheimer’s disease.
See Bill Gates’ blog post here
