"The Alzheimer’s Gamble: NIH Increases Funding to Study Deadly Brain Disease" - Jocelyn Kaiser
Spurred by projections and a controversial national goal to effectively treat Alzheimer’s disease by 2025, Congress has over three years tripled the National Institutes of Health (NIH) annual budget for Alzheimer's and related dementias, to $1.9 billion. The growth spurt isn't over: Two draft 2019 spending bills for NIH would bring the total to $2.3 billion—more than five percent of their overall budget. The funding blitz targets a problem that looks more intractable than ever. The only approved drugs for Alzheimer's don't stop neurodegeneration, but merely treat symptoms—and not very well. In the past year, several major clinical trials based on the field's leading hypothesis—that reducing the level of β-amyloid plaques that riddle the brains of Alzheimer's patients would halt disease progression—have flopped. Those setbacks have amplified concerns that U.S. officials and some scientists have oversold the plan for a treatment by the middle of the next decade. "I am convinced that we are destined to fail to make the 2025 goal and therefore look like we have failed at our promise,” said Samuel Gandy, MD, PhD, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Top of FormBottom of Form
- Samuel Gandy, MD, PhD, Professor, Neurology, Psychiatry, Associate Director, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, Director, The Mount Sinai Center for Cognitive Health and NFL Neurological Care