Find all causes of Alzheimer's disease and a cure

At Cure Alzheimer's Fund, one of our successful strategies is to fund research that is innovative and based on high-quality science yet deemed risky by traditional funding sources.  Our entrepreneurial approach and ability to provide funds in a quick and efficient manner allows us to fund potentially groundbreaking work that otherwise might sit unpursued.

In 2009 we had two very successful examples of this type of leveraging by our funded researchers Robert Moir and Giuseppina Tesco.  Moir's concept that the Abeta peptide is an antimicrobial peptide, and part of the innate immune system, initially was funded by Cure Alzheimer's Fund, and this work led to an RO1 grant, the original and historically oldest grant mechanism from the National Institutes of Health.  Cure Alzheimer's Fund supported Tesco's pilot studies exploring the relationship between traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer's which allowed her to secure an RO1 grant.

And 2010 has brought even more success, with four more leveraging examples and others in the pipeline: 

Charlie Glabe from University of California, Irvine, used his CAF project on anti-oligomer monoclonal antibodies as the preliminary data to support a new NIH RO1 award of $1 million over five years.  He used some of the antibodies he made in the CAF project to show that different types of amyloid oligomers exist and that they warrant further study to determine their role in AD. 

David Holtzman at Washington University, St. Louis used one of his CAF grants to gather preliminary data and publish papers that facilitated a successful grant application to the Ellison Medical Foundation to study how synaptic activity regulates the Abeta peptide and the sleep/wake cycle.

Virginia Lee and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania proposed an innovative way to significantly reduce Abeta levels and plaque deposition in an established mouse model of Alzheimer's disease.  This 'proof of concept' work enabled the team to secure much greater funding, a five year RO1 grant totaling more than $2.3 million for further development of this high-potential therapeutic approach.

Sam Gandy of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine also parlayed his Oligomer Collaborative funding from CAF into a three year Department of Veterans Affairs grant.

This type of support is a big win all around.  Cure Alzheimer's Fund grants are providing seed capital to researchers to prove a concept and then leverage start-up funding into much larger government and private grants. 

Links:

• 2009 Leveraged Research
• 2010 Leveraged Research