Paul G. Allen Family Foundation awards $7 million for Alzheimer’s disease research

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation recently awarded Allen Distinguished Investigator grants totaling $7 million to five teams of researchers to investigate the biology of Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite a significant amount of research in Alzheimer’s disease treatments, clinical trials have a 99.6% failure rate in bringing new treatments to market, according to a press release.

“We cannot hope to fight Alzheimer’s until we understand the basic biology that underlies the onset and progression of disease,” Thomas C. Skalak, PhD, executive director for science and technology at the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, said in the release. “The Allen Distinguished Investigator projects will provide crucial fresh direction in Alzheimer’s disease research, in part because they include team member perspectives both from within and outside the Alzheimer’s field. We know that these kinds of creative, cutting-edge projects will produce new diagnostics, treatments or even cures for this devastating disease.”

Thomas C. Skalak

Recipients of Allen Distinguished Investigator grants include:

Ragnhildur Thora Karadottir, PhD, of the University of Cambridge, will conduct research to identify the role of white matter in Alzheimer’s disease progression using new imaging methods, biosensors and models.
Jeffrey J. Iliff, PhD, and William Rooney, PhD, of Oregon Health and Science University, recently established the glymphatic system in animals, which helps clear plaques and other substances from the brain and is impaired in an aging brain. They will use the grant to study the glymphatic system in humans.
Fred H. “Rusty” Gage, PhD, of Salk Institute, will use cell culture methods, high-throughput RNA sequencing and bioinformatics analysis to compare changes in gene expression due to age and those specific to Alzheimer’s disease.
Aimee Kao, MD, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, will investigate the “pH hypothesis,” which states impaired regulation of cellular pH prevents the clearing of protein and promotes protein aggregation and thus increases risk for neuronal dysfunction and death among patients with Alzheimer’s disease.
Michael Keiser, PhD, Martin Kampmann, PhD, and David Kokel, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco, will employ a big data approach to study gene combinations and drugs that influence the formation of plaques and tangles among patients with Alzheimer’s disease. They will use computational analysis of a “big data” set of 500,000 drug compounds, parallel functional interrogation of human genes and gene combinations and high throughput behavioral analysis of gene and drug effects in a zebrafish model of Alzheimer’s disease.

“The Allen Distinguished Investigator program will help pave the way to novel therapeutic strategies for Alzheimer’s disease,” Dean M. Hartley, PhD, director of science initiatives at the Alzheimer’s Association said. “The truly effective treatments we have now in cancer and heart disease are due to the discovery science that has unraveled the underlying biology of these diseases.”