Banner Alzheimer's Institute: Innovation and Research

Alzheimer’s Prevention Initiative
Initiative Goal: $10 million
Philanthropic investment will support promising prevention trials, including a plaque-reducing antibody therapy in the “primary prevention” of Alzheimer’s (i.e., in cognitively unimpaired at-risk persons before blood test or PET evidence of amyloid plaques) that could have a transformational impact on the fight against this devastating disorder. Investments will also be made in early phase trials of promising gene-silencing and other gene-modifying treatments in people with biomarker evidence of the disease.

We are pioneering efforts to detect, track, and study nearly 6,000 members of the world’s largest autosomal dominant AD kindred in Antioquia, Colombia, who are virtually certain to develop Alzheimer’s and become cognitively impaired at the average age of 44. This work has been extensively covered by The New York Times, CBS 60 Minutes, and media outlets around the word. Importantly, funding will also provide the social supports needed to assist study participants along the way and allow us to share our data, samples, and findings with the field.

Finally, funds will support our ability to share updates about the latest developments in Alzheimer’s prevention research and provide a shared resource of interested participants for prevention research and related studies from our currently 400,000-member Alzheimer’s Prevention Registry. This includes those in whom we have characterized their test results for APOE, the major genetic risk for Alzheimer’s in our currently 125,000 member GeneMatch Program, and plan for the development of an even larger diagnostic blood test screening and trial matching program to find effective prevention therapies as soon as possible. We hope to find and help support FDA approval for an effective “secondary” Alzheimer’s prevention therapy in cognitively unimpaired persons with blood test evidence of amyloid plaques as early as 2025-2026. If successful, we could then extend it to an antibody therapy that could be self-administered at home in unimpaired at-risk persons—with and without blood test evidence of amyloid plaques—as early as 2027-2028.

Alzheimer’s Research Fund
Initiative Goal: $10 million
Philanthropic investment will support collaborative and pilot research projects led by BAI, BSHRI, and BAI-Tucson, including those related to the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium. Preliminary findings then have the potential to leverage large NIH and other grants and contracts in support of our ambitious goals. Funding will also support the equipment and infrastructure related to launching new initiatives and conducting research in innovative, rigorous, and impactful ways; as well as education and training for students in our Neurosciences Scholars Program and other trainees, colleagues and collaborators from diverse backgrounds—helping to engage some of the best and brightest people in the scientific fight against Alzheimer’s and related diseases.

Philanthropic support is also essential for the Brain and Body Donation Program at Banner Sun Health Research Institute. Located in the most highly concentrated area of seniors in the country, the world-renowned program in Sun City, Arizona, includes comprehensive annual assessments and blood samples in about 900 living research participants who agree to donate their brains after they die. The program also includes rapid autopsies, neuropathological assessments, and storage of brain and body tissue following death (including a brain bank with tissue from more than 2,500 donors); the world’s most extensively shared and highest-quality resource of brain tissue and related data for the study of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, related disorders, and normal aging; and an unparalleled resource of blood samples taken near end-of-life to support the development and validation of blood tests for a full range of neurodegenerative and cerebrovascular diseases.

Finally, funding is needed to support the next frontier in Alzheimer’s research: the Cerebrospinal Fluid and Blood-Based Biomarker Program. This program will include leaders in the development of fluid biomarkers, including for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and related disorders, data and biological samples from the Brain and Body Donation Program and other research cohorts needed to develop and test new assays, and an extensively shared resource of blood and CSF samples to advance the development of new assays around the world.