With any innovative ideas at all our fucking failures of stroke associations could shake the money trees and solve all the problems in stroke. But they won't, too fucking lazy and not any functioning neurons in their brains. I would demand the VPs responsible for donations bring in these big bucks or get fired.
Bill Gates makes $100 million personal investment to fight Alzheimer's
LONDON,
Nov 13 (Reuters) - Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is to
invest $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital
fund that brings together industry and government to seek treatments for
the brain-wasting disease.
The
investment - a personal one and not part of Gates’ philanthropic Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation - will be followed by another $50 million
in start-up ventures working in Alzheimer’s research, Gates said.
With
rapidly rising numbers of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other
forms of dementia, the disease is taking a growing emotional and
financial toll as people live longer, Gates told Reuters in an
interview.
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“It’s
a huge problem, a growing problem, and the scale of the tragedy - even
for the people who stay alive - is very high,” he said.
Despite
decades of scientific research, there is no treatment that can slow the
progression of Alzheimer‘s. Current drugs can do no more than ease some
of the symptoms.
Gates said, however, that with focused and
well-funded innovation, he’s “optimistic” treatments can be found, even
if they might be more than a decade away.
”It’ll
take probably 10 years before new theories are tried enough times to
give them a high chance of success. So it’s very hard to hazard a guess
(when an effective drug might be developed).
“I hope that in the next 10 years that we have some powerful drugs, but it’s possible that won’t be achieved.”
Dementia,
of which Alzheimer’s is the most common form, affects close to 50
million people worldwide and is expected to affect more than 131 million
by 2050, according to the non-profit campaign group Alzheimer’s Disease
International.
The
DDF, which was launched in 2015 and involves drugmakers
GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Biogen
Idec as well as the UK government, has already invested in at least nine
start-up companies investigating potential ways to stop or reverse the
biological processes that lead to dementia.
Gates
told Reuters the additional $50 million would be put into start-ups
working on some “less mainstream” approaches to the disease, but said he
had not yet identified these companies.
The
philanthropist, whose usual focus is on infectious diseases in poorer
countries, said Alzheimer’s caught his interest partly for personal
reasons, and partly because it has so far proved such a tough nut to
crack.
“I know how awful it is to watch people
you love struggle as the disease robs them of their mental capacity ...
It feels a lot like you’re experiencing a gradual death of the person
that you knew,” he said in a blog post about the dementia investments.
”Some
of the men in my family have suffered from Alzheimer‘s, but I wouldn’t
say that’s the sole reason“ (for this investment),” he added.
Jeremy
Hughes, chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society charity, welcomed
Gates’ “significant personal investment”, saying it would speed up
progress toward a cure and help reduce stigma around dementia: “With
Bill Gates now joining all those already united against dementia, there
is new hope for advances in the care and cure of dementia,” he said in a
statement.
Through talking to
experts in the field over the past year, Gates said he had identified
five areas of need: Understanding better how Alzheimer’s unfolds,
detecting and diagnosing it earlier, pursuing multiple approaches to
trying to halt the disease, making it easier for people to take part in
clinical trials of potential new medicines, and using data better.
“My
background at Microsoft and my (Gates) Foundation background say to me
that a data-driven contribution might be an area where I can help add
some value,” he said. Alongside the $50 million investment in DDF and the additional $50 million planned for start-ups, Gates said he would like to award a grant to build a global dementia data platform. This would make it easier for researchers to look for patterns and identify new pathways for treatment, he said.
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