Entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates believes the healthcare industry is “at a tipping point on Alzheimer’s.”
That’s what Gates told Scientific American in a recent interview. Gates noted that, at the beginning of last year, the therapeutic pipeline for Alzheimer’s disease encompassed 187 clinical trials and contained 141 therapeutic drug formulations.
Through Gates Ventures, Gates’ private business office, the former Microsoft CEO recently announced a partnership with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation to start the Diagnostics Accelerator program, which aims to achieve earlier diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in patients.
Gates told Scientific American that the Diagnostics Accelerator would focus on five areas: understanding the biology of Alzheimer’s disease, diagnosis, treatment, solving clinical trial delays, and making it easier for research to be shared in a peer-to-peer manner.
“Over the past few decades, drug trials and longitudinal cohort studies have generated an enormous amount of data,” Gates said in the article. “But right now, that information is not being shared to the fullest extent possible. Much of it remains locked away or accessible only to select groups. That’s a missed opportunity as well as a disservice to the people who agreed to join studies so they could help advance the field.”
The recent announcement comes as Gates is also participating in a new global effort to accelerate the prevention, diagnosis, and management of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, known as the Alzheimer’s Moonshot. The effort was announced by Startup Health in partnership with the Diagnostics Accelerator program, as previously reported by Memory Care Business.
Last week, Sinaptica Therapeutics announced it was one of 14 companies selected by the Alzheimer’s Moonshot initiative, with the effort supporting Sinaptica’s phase three clinical development of a non-drug precision neuromodulation therapy to treat Alzheimer’s.
During the interview with Scientific American, Gates touted the latest launch of the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, an effort focused on aiding researchers worldwide with more access to data and data platforms when conducting dementia research.
Gates commented that a timely diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was the “first major shift that needs to happen,” given that the disease is often underdiagnosed.
“If we’re able to catch the disease sooner, we’ll be able to give patients more options for treatment, social services, and participating in clinical trials and other research opportunities,” Gates said in the article.
