By Amy Nordrum -
Amid the looming health threats aging baby boomers face—cancer, diabetes, heart disease and depression—the one modern medicine is least prepared to treat is Alzheimer’s disease. With no cure in sight, researchers who have been scrambling for limited government funds are now looking elsewhere for money.
And the stakes are high. No new drugs for the disease have been developed since 2003. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration approved nine new cancer medicines in 2014 alone. Today’s handful of treatments for the debilitating form of dementia can only stave off the disease’s worst symptoms, including memory loss and confusion, for six months to a year.
"I'm not going to sit here and tell you cancer's not important but with Alzheimer's disease, there are a lot of hidden costs," says Debby Tsuang, co-director at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at University of Washington.
Indeed, the oldest of the nation’s 76 million baby boomers are starting to turn 66. Between now and 2050, this group will face age-related diseases in unprecedented numbers as the second-largest generation in the nation’s history. About one in eight baby boomers, or 10 million, will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Patients with the disease usually live for eight to 10 years after diagnosis and are often admitted to nursing homes as the disease progresses or rely on loved ones to care for them at home. Without a cure, the Alzheimer’s Association warns the direct costs of caring for patients in the U.S. could balloon to $1.2 trillion by 2050 from $214 billion today.
Tsuang and her staff largely rely on federal grants to do their work as the government’s frontline researchers on the disease. Scientists at her center compete for money with those at 28 other centers throughout the U.S. that are also supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA). And lately, Tsuang has noticed that the requests posted by NIA have favored research that looks into the disease’s earliest stages. That focus limits some of Tsuang’s staff from seeking funds for new or ongoing projects geared toward basic research or late-stage treatments.
Scientists and patient advocates would like to see research that approaches the disease from many angles, and important discoveries in the past few years have given them no shortage of ideas about worthy avenues to pursue. Their biggest challenge has been figuring out how to pay for all of it. Tsuang says that while new research suggests that a third of Alzheimer’s disease may be preventable through lifestyle changes, scientists at the nation's Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers may not choose to study this approach because it falls outside the NIA’s funding priorities.
There’s a wide gap between the federal government’s funding of Alzheimer’s disease research and the amount that its own advisors say will be necessary to find a cure.
The government’s advisory council on Alzheimer’s disease has said that Congress must ramp up federal funding to $2 billion a year by 2025 to spur breakthroughs. Last year, Alzheimer’s disease research received less than half of that or $562 million from the National Institute of Health (NIH) while cancer research received $5.4 billion in funding and studies into heart disease and diabetes each received just over a billion dollars. Next year, the government has pledged to increase investment into Alzheimer's disease research to $638 million but a boost in funding by that same amount every year until 2025 would still cause the government to fall about $600 million short of its long-term goal.
So Alzheimer’s researchers are doing what their colleagues focused on chronically underfunded diseases such as cystic fibrosis and Parkinson’s disease have done in the past -- turning to public-private funding models and seeking donations from foundations to support their work. Over the weekend, the University of Washington announced a $6 million gift from the Ellison Medical Foundation to the school’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center that will jumpstart its first foray into precision medicine, an approach which focuses on developing customized courses of treatment for patients based on their genetics and lifestyle factors. The donation is a fraction of the $20 million that the school hopes to raise.
Elsewhere, research groups are also leaning on diverse sources of funding to investigate Alzheimer’s disease. In the U.K., an industry-led $100 million partnership called the Global Dementia Discovery Fund that will serve as a venture capital fund to invest in the world's most promising Alzheimer's-related research launched earlier this month.
Though the U.K. government contributed $22 million to the effort, GlaxoSmithKline topped that commitment with a $25 million donation. Four other pharmaceutical companies are also chipping in, and their collective donations far outpaced federal support.
In the U.S., leaders of a dozen Fortune 500 companies have joined the Global CEO Initiative on Alzheimer’s Disease as a project of the nonprofit called US Against Alzheimer’s. George Vradenberg, founder of the parent organization, has lately made it his mission to collect CEOs from influential corporations who could advocate for more public and private dollars to fast-track Alzheimer’s disease research. Vradenberg estimates that globally, there is only about $700 million available for research into Alzheimer’s disease – which is not even half of that which the federal government’s advisory council has requested for the U.S. alone by 2025.
“It is clear beyond words that innovative medicine in this area is not going to come from government so we turned our attention to engaging with business and industry,” Vradenberg says. The members are mostly pharmaceutical and healthcare companies but he convinced executives at Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) that they should take up the cause, as well.
Surya Kolluri, director of policy and market planning for Bank of America, says that the risk that Alzheimer's disease poses to both the bank's clients and their finances could no longer be ignored. “We're all reading about how many people have it and how many people will have it,” Kolluri says. “It's going to become such a big phenomenon that we're all going to begin to pay attention to it, including financial services organizations.”
Vradenberg and Andy Seig, head of global wealth and retirement for Bank of America pointed out in a recent editorial published in The Hill that the total assets of all high-net-worth clients in the U.S. are worth more than $20 trillion. If only a fraction of this money were leveraged for research into Alzheimer’s disease, it could easily meet and surpass the goal set by the federal advisory council.
Vradenberg says he thinks more of the world's wealthiest individuals will start their own foundations and donate to research on Alzheimer’s disease in the coming years, just like the Ellison family did for the University of Washington. For now, Tsuang says, there is much more room for improvement.