Explore key milestones and see how our researchers are improving lives.

Alzheimer’s Disease Research-funded scientists Drs. Allen Roses, Peter St. George-Hyslop, Thomas Bird, and Gerard Schellenberg identify apolipoprotein E (APOE) as a major risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Today, APOE is the most common gene associated with Alzheimer’s.

Grantee Stanley Prusiner, MD, was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking discovery and definition of prions, infectious proteins in the brain that cause mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. There are similarities between the loss of brain function in prion diseases and in Alzheimer’s disease, and an understanding of how prion diseases begin and develop may one day lead to a treatment and a cure for Alzheimer’s. Dr. Prusiner served as co-chair of our Alzheimer’s Disease Research Scientific Review Committee and became an honorary BrightFocus board member in 2007. In 2010, President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Science, the country’s highest honor for science and technology.

Following his exciting discovery that Alzheimer’s disease can be detected in the lens of the eye, Lee Goldstein, MD, PhD, and his team developed new optical tests that can potentially diagnose and monitor the disease from the beginning stages, a discovery that could lead to an accessible, noninvasive way to detect, track, and treat Alzheimer’s.

BrightFocus offers its first workshop dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease research, now known as Alzheimer’s Fast Track, for PhD students and postdoctoral fellows to learn from world-renowned experts in the field. Today, the program includes Macular Fast Track and Glaucoma Fast Track and has educated thousands of early-career scientists from around the world.

A team led by Alzheimer’s Disease Research grantees Kristen Funk, PhD, and Marc Diamond, PhD, brings us closer to the possibility of a vaccine by researching antibody immunotherapies to help rid the brain of toxic tau—and possibly keep it from spreading—in Alzheimer’s disease. Results of in vitro experiments show that monoclonal antibodies they’ve developed can disarm the harmful effects of abnormal tau protein, laying the groundwork for present-day clinical trials using anti-tau antibodies.

To accelerate Alzheimer’s research, BrightFocus grantee Pietro Michelucci, PhD, created the first-ever citizen science online game Stall Catchers, where participants look at videos from the brains of mice and try to identify vessel blockages, or “stalls,” to help researchers at Cornell University. Scientists have pinpointed the link between stalls and Alzheimer’s disease in mouse models and have successfully reversed some symptoms by reducing the number of stalls. While documenting these stalls is very time-consuming for researchers, citizen scientists playing the BrightFocus-funded Stall Catchers have drastically increased research output.

With BrightFocus support, grantee Ann-Charlotte “Lotta” Granholm-Bentley, PhD, DDS, created the first-ever International Brain Bank for Down Syndrome-Related Alzheimer’s Disease, a collaborative research network that develops and shares high-quality biological research samples and studies information about the Down syndrome population, of which as many as 80% have Alzheimer’s pathology by the time they are in their 40s and 50s.

In a seminal BrightFocus-funded publication on sleep and beta amyloid, coauthors and grantees Sarah Fritschi, PhD, Brendan Lucey, MD, and David Holtzman, MD, PhD, are among the first to confirm that sleep deprivation is a risk factor for—not just a consequence of—Alzheimer’s disease. The findings reveal that lack of sleep alone helps drive the disease, suggesting that good sleep habits may help preserve brain health.

A team including grantee Ksenia Kastanenka, PhD, finds that sleep quality may serve as a marker of future Alzheimer’s disease risk and the speed of progression. Sleep disturbance is associated with a higher rate of future beta-amyloid accumulation and deep sleep can clear toxic beta-amyloid and tau from the brain, the researchers confirm.

Led by grantee Thomas Karikari, PhD, a research team identifies a less frequently measured biomarker of tau in the blood, BD-tau, that positively correlates with neurodegeneration and cognitive impairment before symptoms begin. BD-tau outperforms existing blood tests used to detect Alzheimer’s-related neurodegeneration and could lead to earlier and more accurate Alzheimer’s diagnoses.

BrightFocus and the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium jointly award $500,000 grants to researchers at Astrocyte Pharmaceuticals and a partnership between Mitochon Pharmaceuticals and the University of Kentucky for the study of neuroprotective therapeutics for the treatment of brain injuries, which could lower risk of subsequent Alzheimer’s and related dementias.