Healthy Living

Bill Gates Determined to Find a Cure for Alzheimer's

The Dementia Discovery Fund's mission

Photo: The Dementia Discovery Fund logo. Source: theddfund.com

The Dementia Discovery Fund is an organization that collaborates with charities, the government and the pharmaceutical industry on a large, global scale to fund innovative research that tackles Alzheimer's disease. Their goal is to find and develop treatments for dementia, which will hopefully lead to finding a cure.

The CEO of the Dementia Discovery Fund describes their key goal as to "bring diversity to the range of approaches we are going to use to attack dementia. We're looking at it very broadly as a disease of cells, a disease of systems, a disease of organs" (theddfund.com). They fund projects that are more novel ideas that revolve around dementia, and tackle the less-common hypotheses that are associated with the disease.

They are involved with numerous pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Biogen Idec, and also the UK government. From their work, there is already nine start-up companies that are looking into new ways to stop or reverse the factors that lead to dementia (Reuters).

For more information on the Dementia Discovery Fund, go to: http://theddfund.com/