We’re entering a golden age of Alzheimer’s research

I'll never forget the moment I learned that my dad had Alzheimer's disease. I felt so powerless and scared. Yet, like a lot of people who get this news, I couldn’t help but have hope that a breakthrough would come.

For a long time and for so many families, that hope was unfounded. (We lost my dad to the disease in 2020.) But now, finally, things are changing. We are entering a golden age of Alzheimer's research. Our knowledge of how the human brain works is growing at a tremendous rate, and it’s revolutionizing how scientists approach saving lives.

When I first got involved with Alzheimer’s back in 2017, my expectation for what we would achieve was very modest. A number of high-profile trials for new drugs had failed, and the process for diagnosing someone—either a PET scan or a spinal tap—was costly and time-consuming. The problem was scale: not enough people diagnosed early enough, not enough people in clinical trials, not enough data sharing to learn more.

I thought the research field could do a bit better if it had more resources, but I’m completely blown away by just how much it’s improved. The progress we’ve made is amazing to me. Just look at this list of milestones from the last couple years:

• For the first time, we have simple blood tests that tell you whether you have Alzheimer’s.
• Because of these tests, enrollment in clinical trials is beginning to accelerate. Researchers used to be able to screen only one or two potential patients every day. Now they can screen hundreds. This means new treatments could arrive sooner.
• The FDA approved the first two treatments proven to modestly slow the progression of the disease, and preliminary data indicate they might be dramatically more impactful when given early in the progression.

This progress can’t come quickly enough. In 2017, 5.5 million people in the U.S. were living with the disease. Today, that number has ballooned to an estimated 7.4 million. The good news is that our understanding of the disease is improving rapidly, and I expect to see plenty more breakthroughs in the months and years ahead.

Research continues into next generation treatments that could be twice as effective as the current options, or even better. I’m closely watching a clinical trial that’s looking at whether donanemab, one of the new drugs currently available, could not only slow down the progression of the disease but significantly delay its onset or even prevent it altogether. We should get the results either late this year or early next year, and if they’re positive, it’ll completely change the game.

Meanwhile, the diagnostics are continuing to improve. Today, tests can tell you whether you currently have Alzheimer’s. In the next year or two, we should know whether it’s possible to determine if someone will get Alzheimer’s in the future. The better the tests continue to get, the more people can enroll in clinical trials. Each breakthrough makes it easier to find the new one.

The key with both drugs and diagnostics will be getting them into the hands of people who need them the most. Right now, if you want to take a blood test, you have to pay for it out of pocket. Here in the U.S., it’d expand access massively if the tests and drugs were covered by Medicare and Medicaid. I hope the Center for Medicare & Medicine Services chooses to cover them soon (especially when you consider that dementia costs the U.S. more than $780 billion every year—including more than $160 billion by Medicare and Medicaid alone).

With these new tools, over the next five to ten years, we might finally start to get the upper hand on this awful disease. And here’s another thing on our side: artificial intelligence. There’s a lot of very cool work being done to diagnose Alzheimer’s by using AI to detect changes in how you speak. I’m particularly excited about how AI’s ability to find meaning in large amounts of data will make research go a lot faster.

Research can be a time-consuming and often tedious business. Something as simple as pulling the data sets you need can take up a huge chunk of your time. Agents like Biomni-AD and Parthenon—the winners of the Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize—can act like a co-researcher, enabling entire workflows autonomously by pulling permissioned datasets and flagging patterns a human might miss.

AI is also helping scientists write their own code, so they’re able to run regression analyses on their own and test more hypotheses more quickly. Many researchers don’t have access to a biostatistician or a data scientist to help them with this. Now, more people can code on their own, and the stats experts are able to focus their time on supporting the most promising hypotheses.

Platforms like the Global Research and Imaging Platform, or GRIP, are making both data access and availability of AI agents possible at scale. We’ll make more advances in the field if researchers and data scientists can work together to share data and develop algorithms and tools. That’s why one of the big focuses of my Alzheimer’s work has been getting more data into their hands. I worked with a coalition of partners to create the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, which now has more than 10,000 users from over 125 countries, and the Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium, which has more than 300 million unique protein measures for scientists to learn from.

I believe that we’ll find the answers to some of our biggest questions in that data over the next two to three years. Why do some people get Alzheimer’s in their 60s while others live to 100 and have healthy brains? Is Alzheimer’s one disease, or can we break it into subtypes? Why do more women get it than men? There’s a lot we still don’t know about the brain, and once we understand more, we’ll see a ton of breakthroughs.

We’ve seen this kind of progress before. There was a time not too long ago when an HIV diagnosis was a death sentence. We didn’t understand the disease, and we had no way to stop it. But once scientists began to unravel the biology, progress accelerated. Today, people with HIV can live long, healthy lives. I’m optimistic that, one day, we’ll be able to talk about Alzheimer’s disease the same way.