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.
“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 focussed 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 Disease International.
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