Richest people in the world came together to save patient from Alzheimer’s disease. Bill Gate’s The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Jeff Bezos’ Day One Fund have merge to donate fund of $15 million to the Diagnostics Accelerator, a project that is part of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF).
The Diagnostics Accelerator’s mission is straightforward, although quite difficult—develops an easy and affordable test for Alzheimer’s disease. As per media report, last year Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation launched the fund with initial commitments of $35 million from several leaders in business and medicine, including Bill Gates.
On his blog, GatesNotes, Bill Gates writes, “It’s hard to overstate how important finding a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use diagnostic is for stopping Alzheimer’s.” Gates writes, “There’s a good chance a blood test will start being used to recruit patients into Alzheimer’s drug trials within the next year or two.”
Another approach that Gates is excited about is linguistic. Rhoda Au heads neuropsychology for the Framingham Heart Study, which has tracked the health of one town’s residents for more than 70 years, including audio records of the patients.
The recent failure of Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab by Biogen and Tokyo-based Eisai underlines the difficulties of developing drugs to prevent and treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Howard Fillit, Founding Executive Director and Chief Science Officer of the ADDF wrote in a blog shortly after the failure was reported, “I had hope for this study as it had some promising results in the earlier phases of clinical development, showing that the drug ‘hit its target’ and was able to remove beta-amyloid from the brain of patients. It was also one of the first clinical trials to ensure that every patient participating had beta-amyloid plaques in their brains. The ADDF supported the first biomarker ever approved to diagnose Alzheimer’s—the beta-amyloid PET scan—and we continue to invest in these critical tools.”