Venture philanthropist invests $3.5 million to thwart Alzheimer's disease
Retired San Francisco real estate developer Douglas Rosenberg says he has a new job - helping to find a cure for Alzheimer's disease. Through the Ellen and Douglas Rosenberg Foundation, the venture philanthropist is betting at least $3.5 million that Buck faculty Dale Bredesen, MD has the correct take on how to thwart the memory robbing disease that affects over 5 million Americans. The two have formed a unique partnership aimed at developing treatments based on the results of small molecule screenings that show promise in cell culture and animal models of the disease. Rosenberg's goal is to raise at least $10 million to get the new drug candidates into early clinical trials.
"We can't afford to wait, I can't afford to wait," said Rosenberg. "Big Pharma is not stepping up to the plate and the federal government, through the National Institutes of Health, is not providing money for this type of drug development either."
Rosenberg has seen the worst of Alzheimer's. His father, prominent San Francisco businessman and nationally-renowned philanthropist Claude Rosenberg, Jr. died from the neurodegenerative disease in 2008. His stepfather died from the condition that same year. His stepmother succumbed to complications of Alzheimer's in 2010.
A friend invited Rosenberg to hear Bredesen speak at the Stanford Marin Club in November 2007. Rosenberg said he got excited about Bredesen's research. "It was a fresh approach -- he was taking a look at the root causes of Alzheimer's way upstream from other work I was familiar with," said Rosenberg. "Ironically, I had never been to a Stanford function before, so I assumed it wasn't an accident that we met." The two men became friends.
Bredesen, an academic neurologist turned researcher, focuses on Alzheimer's as a disorder involving an imbalance in signaling between neurons that impacts brain plasticity, rather than the current dogma that Alzheimer's is a disease of toxicity stemming predominantly from damage caused by amyloid plaques that collect in the brain. Bredesen believes those plaques are an effect, not a cause of the disease - his theory explains why experimental drugs aimed at getting rid of the plaques have failed repeatedly in clinical trials; his research also points the way toward what he thinks could be the first effective treatments.
2011-02-01
Venture philanthropist invests $3.5 million to thwart Alzheimer's disease - http://www.news-medical.net
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