Alzheimer's Research UK will put up to 45 million pounds behind another five years of its Drug Discovery Alliance, the charity's Director of Research Dr Sheona Scales announced at its Annual Research Conference in Manchester. The Alliance links three drug discovery centres based at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford and University College London.
The Alliance was set up in 2015 to tackle a specific bottleneck rather than a shortage of ideas. Promising discoveries were emerging from UK university labs, but few were making the difficult jump from early-stage science to the point where they could be tested in clinical trials. Disease-modifying treatments looked like a distant prospect at the time.
That picture has shifted over the past decade. The charity points to a strengthened drug discovery pipeline alongside the arrival of the first treatments capable of slowing Alzheimer's, which are now beginning to reach patients in some countries. The renewed funding is a response to what has not changed: by Alzheimer's Research UK's own assessment, too many good ideas still stall inside the lab.
For people living with dementia and their families, the practical value of this kind of investment is indirect and slow to arrive. It does not produce a treatment tomorrow. What it does is keep more candidate drugs moving through the stage where projects most often die for lack of money or specialist expertise, which is the only route by which future therapies reach trials at all.