Alzheimer's Disease Fact Sheet

Description

Alzheimer's disease is a degenerative brain disease that causes dementia, which impairs people's ability to think, reason and remember things. More than five million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease in the U.S. today. Those people generally live much shorter lives and their medical expenses, combined with lost income for both them and their caregivers, is approximately $236 billion a year as of 2016. Alzheimer’s disease is currently the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. There are no drugs to treat the disease, although some do relieve symptoms.

The exact causes of Alzheimer's disease are unknown, however scientists believe that genetic risk factors make up 70% of Alzheimer's case. One problem that has slowed new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease is the fact that no animal model truly mimics the disease. Drugs that have effectively treated animals with a form of Alzheimer’s haven’t worked in humans. What that means is that we need a better way of finding new drugs. CIRM funds several awards to researchers who are creating stem cell models of the disease in a lab dish using cells from Alzheimer’s patients. They can then test drugs on nerve cells derived from the stem cells of Alzheimer’s patients to look for ones that eliminate symptoms of the disease. These models are the only way of testing drugs in actual human cells.

The agency also funds teams that are in the early stages of developing potential therapies using stem cells. Some groups are trying to mature embryonic stem cells into a cell type that can be transplanted into the brain to replace cells that are destroyed in the disease. Others are simply using stem cells as a way of delivering factors that appear to protect brain cells. One team is trying to use stem cells to clear out the protein that builds up and clogs neurons in Alzheimer’s patients.

CIRM Grants Targeting Alzheimer's Disease

Researcher name	Institution	Grant Title	Grant Type	Award Amount
Alexandra Capela	StemCells, Inc.	Neuroprotection to treat Alzheimer's: a new paradigm using human central nervous system cells	Disease Team Therapy Planning I	$90,101
Roberta Brinton	University of Southern California	A CIRM Disease Team to Develop Allopregnanolone for Prevention and Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease	Disease Team Therapy Planning I	$107,961
Lawrence Goldstein	University of California, San Diego	Identifying Drugs for Alzheimer's Disease with Human Neurons Made From Human IPS cells	Early Translational III	$1,774,420
David Schubert	Salk Institute for Biological Studies	Stem cell based small molecule therapy for Alzheimer's disease	Early Translational III	$1,673,757
Alexandra Capela	StemCells, Inc.	Restoration of memory in Alzheimer’s disease: a new paradigm using neural stem cell therapy	Disease Team Therapy Development - Research	$8,901,641
James Brewer	University of California, San Diego	Collection of skin biopsies to prepare fibroblasts from patients with Alzheimer's disease and cognitively healthy elderly controls	Tissue Collection for Disease Modeling	$643,693
Lawrence Goldstein	University of California, San Diego	Elucidating pathways from hereditary Alzheimer mutations to pathological tau phenotypes	Basic Biology V	$1,050,300
Douglas Ethell	The Regents of the University of California on behalf of its Riverside Campus	ES-Derived Cells for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease	New Faculty I	$621,639
Tony Wyss-Coray	Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research	Systemic Protein Factors as Modulators of the Aging Neurogenic Niche	Basic Biology II	$1,159,806
Mathew Blurton-Jones	University of California, Irvine	Optimizing the differentiation and expansion of microglial progenitors from human pluripotent stem cells for the study and treatment of neurological disease.	Tools and Technologies III	$1,147,596
Anirvan Ghosh	University of California, San Diego	Generation of forebrain neurons from human embryonic stem cells	SEED Grant	$587,591
David Schubert	Salk Institute for Biological Studies	Human Stem-Cell Based Development of a Potent Alzheimer’s Drug Candidate	Preclinical Development Awards	$1,664,885
Frank LaFerla	University of California, Irvine	Development of human ES cell lines as a model system for Alzheimer disease drug discovery	SEED Grant	$473,963
Yadong Huang	Gladstone Institutes, J. David	Human iPSC-derived GABAergic Progenitors for Alzheimer’s Disease Treatment	Therapeutic Translational Research Projects	$1,900,000
Yadong Huang	Gladstone Institutes, J. David	Defining the Isoform-Specific Effects of Apolipoprotein E on the Development of iPS Cells into Functional Neurons in Vitro and in Vivo	New Faculty II	$2,757,303
Janet Baulch	University of California, Irvine	An exosome-based translational strategy to mitigate Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology	Inception - Discovery Stage Research Projects	$157,650
Lawrence Goldstein	University of California, San Diego	Using Human Embryonic Stem Cells to Understand and to Develop New Therapies for Alzheimer's Disease	Comprehensive Grant	$1,859,414
Stuart Lipton	Scripps Research Institute	Drug Development of Inhibitors of Inflammation Using Human iPSC-Derived Microglia (hiMG)	Quest - Discovery Stage Research Projects	$1,658,123
Frank LaFerla	University of California, Irvine	Neural Stem Cells as a Developmental Candidate to Treat Alzheimer Disease	Early Translational I	$3,599,997
Douglas Ethell	Western University of Health Sciences	ES-Derived Cells for the Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease	New Faculty I	$1,401,642
Lawrence Goldstein	University of California, San Diego	Developing a method for rapid identification of high-quality disease specific hIPSC lines	Tools and Technologies II	$1,686,069
				Total: $34,917,551.00

Researcher name

Institution

Grant Title

Grant Type

Award Amount

Alexandra Capela

StemCells, Inc.

Neuroprotection to treat Alzheimer's: a new paradigm using human central nervous system cells

Disease Team Therapy Planning I

$90,101

Roberta Brinton

University of Southern California