February 16, 2015
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Cambridge, UK-based Alzheimer’s Research UK today announced a Drug Discovery Alliance that will invest £30 million in three institutes in Cambridge, Oxford and London.
The institutes will be located at the University of Cambridge , University of Oxford and University College London (UCL). They will hire 90 new researchers with a focus on fast-tracking development of new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Each institute will be led by a chief scientific officer whose task will be to coordinate work with academic researchers at the three universities and with researchers at the Alzheimer’s Research UK.”
“The new institute will be a world class environment in which to conduct research aimed at transforming the lives of patients living with dementia,” said David Rubinsztein, who will lead the Cambridge Drug Discovery Institute, in a statement. “It will build on our strengths in basic research and its translation into new treatments for patients.”
In the UK, dementia affects more than 830,000 people. In the U.S., more than 5 million people have Alzheimer’s and one in three seniors die with Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia. Worldwide, about 36 million people have Alzheimer’s or some other type of dementia.
Despite those numbers, Alzheimer’s and dementia research falls behind cardiovascular and cancer research. There are no particularly effective treatments for Alzheimer’s. As a result, healthcare leaders worldwide made a pledge recently to develop a therapy to modify dementia by 2025.
“We’re providing the investment and infrastructure that is needed to maintain and grow a healthy pipeline of potential new treatments to take forward into clinical testing,” said Eric Karran, director of research at Alzheimer’s Research UK in a statement. “It’s only by boosting the number of promising leads to follow-up, that we’ll have the best chance of developing pioneering medicines that can change the outlook of this devastating condition.”
A recent study by Alzheimer’s Research UK indicated that women receive the brunt of Alzheimer’s, both in terms of acquiring the disease as well as the social caregiver aspects. The report is titled “Women and Dementia: A Marginalised Majority.”
In the UK, the report found that about 500,000 women were currently affected by dementia compared to 350,000 men. They are more than two-and-a-half times more likely to be caregivers of individuals with dementia than men. And very surprisingly, the study found that women over 60 years of age were twice as likely to get dementia as breast cancer.
“Women are carrying the responsibility of caring for their loved ones, only later to be living with the condition,” said the report. “Women are dying from dementia but not before it has taken a considerable toll on minds and bodies. In the UK, dementia hits women the hardest.”
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