The Next Wave of Brain Research

Government support

The DDF was the brainchild of David Cameron, former prime minister of the United Kingdom and a longtime advocate of boosting dementia research. In December 2013, when Cameron chaired a G-8 summit, he used the annual meeting of the world’s biggest industrial nations to make combating dementia a global priority, recalls Nick Seddon, then Cameron’s special adviser for health and life sciences. As a result, the member states set up the World Dementia Council, which helped to shape the DDF.

Seddon worked with several UK government agencies and investment bank J.P. Morgan to find the best model for the initiative. They opted for a commercial investment fund, seeded with 15 mil­lion pounds (about $20 million in today’s dollars) from the UK Treasury.

“We believed the optimal approach would blend different investors,” Seddon says. The final mix now includes seven pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline; Bill Gates, who donated $50 million in 2017; several nonprofits, including AARP and Alzheimer’s Research UK; United Health Group; Quest Diagnostics; and a private equity firm.

The fund is a form of so-called impact investing, in which the goal isn’t just financial returns but also achieving results that measurably help society. “Cancer research as a field has benefited hugely from impact investing,” says Laurence Barker, the DDF’s chief business officer. It has resulted in many effective drugs for different cancers. At the same time, “market forces are now able to demonstrate a clear rationale for private investment in this field.”  How DDF investors use any future gains is, of course, up to them. And these financial gains, if they come, likely are many years away. But, Barker says, many investors have “indicated a long-term commitment to dementia research, and so may well use gains to continue to invest in this area.” At AARP, any profits derived from its DDF investment will be reinvested in its ongoing social-mission work.

New approaches 

Ahead of the fund’s launch, industry and academic experts convinced Seddon that it needed to finance new ideas and methods. “Dementia research wasn’t identifying the right targets, and there was not enough focus on novel therapies,” he says.

For years, the prevailing hypothesis has been that the root cause of Alzheimer’s­ — which accounts for as much as 80 percent of dementia cases — is amyloid beta, a protein that can accumulate as a sticky plaque in the brain. So billions of dollars have been spent to develop drugs that can stop that plaque from forming or eliminate it once it starts to accumulate. But none have had any effect in stopping or slowing the disease. 

So the DDF is looking in new directions, such as funding research that uses genetic data and new diagnostic technologies — for example, new brain-imaging techniques and the use of biomarkers to follow brain activity. The goal is to determine the causes of dementia beyond the amyloid hypothesis, so these causes can be targeted with new therapies.

Tiaki, for example, is focused on microglia. Another company the DDF has funded, Alector, uses genetic data to find antibodies that can “harness a patient’s own immune system to tackle the disease,” Bingham says. Alector is already making progress: A large pharmaceutical company recently invested $225 million to help it take two drugs into initial clinical trials next year. 

So far, the DDF has made 16 investments, using about 30 percent of its funds. The plan is to make roughly 40 investments overall.

Given that drug development is a complex and costly endeavor, all research funded by the DDF is based on rigorous science. It is “essential that we start any program with the strongest possible rationale and the strongest possible scientific team,” Barker says. 

To enforce that rigor, the DDF has an advisory board that includes neuroscientists from each of the seven pharmaceutical investors, as well as the chief scientific officer at Alzheimer’s Research UK. Barker adds: “Many of the investments we have made are based on discoveries at top academic institutions,” including Harvard, Stanford and Yale. 

The end goal is, by 2030, to discover at least three drugs that provide initial data in human clinical trials showing strong evidence that they work. 

Ultimately, Bingham envisions a time when a simple blood test could reveal a person’s propensity for developing dementia. Then for those most at risk, early intervention should keep the disease at bay for many years. That’s not a full cure. But it’s close.

Thomas K. Grose is a London-based journalist who has contributed to Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report.