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Author: Jean-Claude Muller, 穆卓Executive Editor at BtoBioInnovation jcm9144@gmail.com
Special Report #15
Jeff Bezos joins Bill Gates to support Alzheimer’s disease research
On 13 November 2017, Bill Gates announced a plan to donate $50 million of his own money to fund Alzheimer’s disease research. On 3 April 2019, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and possibly the richest man on earth, and other donors, announced their backing of the effort with the main focus to build better ways to diagnose and monitor Alzheimer’s disease.
When Bill Gates announced the launch of its initiative, he said progress needs to be done in five areas.
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Understanding the disease better, particularly in early stages.
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Detecting and diagnosing clinical sings of the disease better.
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Broadening the range of disease targets to include more than just beta amyloid and tau.
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Lowering barriers for the recruitment of patients into clinical trials.
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Making better use of data from patient’s health records.
The Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADFF), an accelerator fund launched in July 2018 with $35 million, is already naming the first grantees and is beginning taking applications for a second round of grants focused on fast-tracking digital tools for the disease. With the addition of Jeff Bezos and his wife MacKenzie, and other anonymous funding commitments, the ADDF has now collected nearly $50 million.
On a post on his blog, Bill Gates pointed into new research out of the current standards of brain scans and cerebrospinal fluid punctures, which are too expensive or too invasive to be pursued until after a person has shown cognitive decline. “It’s hard to overstate how important finding a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use diagnostic is for stopping Alzheimer’s” pointing to new technologies of voice recordings to identify early signs of dementia.
The main focus of the current program on early diagnosis is triggered at digital biomarkers such as audio analysis and other cognitive assessments, based on data gathered by the Framingham Heart Study of audio recordings of its participants during several decades. “There’s a lot going on when you speak,” Gates wrote. “The whole assembly process of how you string words together and form sentences is complicated. If you could use a computer to analyse how an Alzheimer’s patient speaks over the years, you might be able to pick up on subtle changes—and then look for those same patterns in younger patients who show no other signs of the disease,” he added.
The ADDF hopes to augment traditional wet laboratory tests and imaging tool with other cost-effective approaches such as a digital audio analyses and use them in future clinical settings. “This real-world evidence has the potential to add significant value to clinical trials, increasing patient engagement, enhancing monitoring, and greatly improving treatment outcomes” said Howard Filling, the founding director and chief science officer of the ADDF.
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