Ryan Corces, PhD, an investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, is one of eight scientists named 2026 winners of the Pershing Square Foundation's MIND Prize. The award carries $750,000 over three years and is aimed at researchers working on neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's and other dementias of aging.
The MIND Prize is given annually to eight recipients and is explicitly designed to push high-risk, high-reward neuroscience forward by building bridges between academic labs, the biomedical industry, philanthropy, and the business world. That structure matters in dementia research, where promising laboratory findings often stall for years before anyone has the resources or partnerships to test them at scale.
Announcing the cohort, Pershing Square Foundation trustee Neri Oxman, PhD, framed the moment optimistically, saying that advanced technologies and human creativity mean Alzheimer's disease and related conditions "are finally being considered remediable disorders of the human condition." She described this year's winners as work that ties molecular structures to behavioral patterns, and genetic predispositions to the power of artificial intelligence.
For patients and families, an award like this does not change care today. What it does is fund the unglamorous middle stage of discovery - the years of genetic and molecular work needed before any therapy can be designed - and signals that private philanthropy is willing to underwrite that stage in a field with a long history of failed drug trials.