What is the dementia discovery fund?

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT The DDF was the brainchild of David Cameron, former prime minister of the United Kingdom and a longtime advocate of boosting dementia research. In December 2013, when

Cameron chaired a G-8 summit, he used the annual meeting of the world’s biggest industrial nations to make combating dementia a global priority, recalls Nick Seddon, then Cameron’s special

adviser for health and life sciences. As a result, the member states set up the World Dementia Council, which helped to shape the DDF. Seddon worked with several UK government agencies and

investment bank J.P. Morgan to find the best model for the initiative. They opted for a commercial investment fund, seeded with 15 mil­lion pounds (about $20 million in today’s dollars) from

the UK Treasury. “We believed the optimal approach would blend different investors,” Seddon says. The final mix now includes seven pharmaceutical companies, including Eli Lilly, Johnson

& Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline; Bill Gates, who donated $50 million in 2017; several nonprofits, including AARP and Alzheimer’s Research UK; United Health Group; Quest Diagnostics; and a

private equity firm. The fund is a form of so-called impact investing, in which the goal isn’t just financial returns but also achieving results that measurably help society. “Cancer

research as a field has benefited hugely from impact investing,” says Laurence Barker, the DDF’s chief business officer. It has resulted in many effective drugs for different cancers. At the

same time, “market forces are now able to demonstrate a clear rationale for private investment in this field.”  How DDF investors use any future gains is, of course, up to them. And these

financial gains, if they come, likely are many years away. But, Barker says, many investors have “indicated a long-term commitment to dementia research, and so may well use gains to continue

to invest in this area.” At AARP, any profits derived from its DDF investment will be reinvested in its ongoing social-mission work. NEW APPROACHES  Ahead of the fund’s launch, industry and

academic experts convinced Seddon that it needed to finance new ideas and methods. “Dementia research wasn’t identifying the right targets, and there was not enough focus on novel

therapies,” he says. For years, the prevailing hypothesis has been that the root cause of Alzheimer’s­ — which accounts for as much as 80 percent of dementia cases — is amyloid beta, a

protein that can accumulate as a sticky plaque in the brain. So billions of dollars have been spent to develop drugs that can stop that plaque from forming or eliminate it once it starts to

accumulate. But none have had any effect in stopping or slowing the disease.