March 29, 2017

Today’s Top Alzheimer’s News

USA2 SPOTLIGHT

According to a March 29, 2017 Fierce Biotech article, the President is calling for an additional $1.23 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health budget for the 2017 fiscal year, in addition to the already deep cuts proposed for 2018. This would require eliminating $50 million worth of new IDEA grants, and taking $1.18 billion for new research grants, with an even deeper reduction in FY18. UsAgainstAlzheimer’s Co-Founder and Chairman, George Vradenburg, said: “We remain deeply troubled by the administration’s attempts to undermine the recent progress that has been made to make cures and innovation in biomedical research and in Alzheimer’s research a higher national priority. We will continue to work in a bipartisan way to fight back against budget cuts that will chill the efforts to cure Alzheimer’s disease, a disease that costs the nation today more than a quarter of a billion dollars per year. Developing a cure for this dreadful disease is essential to avoid the inevitably increasing costs of managing it.”

UsAgainstAlzheimer’s put out a March 28, 2017 press release urging Congress to say “no” to the President’s proposed 2017 and 2018 budget cuts to science and research funding. “UsAgainstAlzheimer’s is strongly opposed to any decreases in NIH research funding or in Alzheimer’s research budgets. Since its founding in 2010, UsAgainstAlzheimer’s has worked earnestly to double public funding for Alzheimer’s research at NIH and is calling upon Congress to increase – not reduce – NIH investment in Alzheimer’s research in FY 2017 and 2018.” The minimum level of annual funding to achieve the national goal of stopping Alzheimer’s by 2025 is $2 billion a year at NIH. 

MUST READS

A March 29, 2017 Orange County Register opinion letter by Joshua Grill, PhD, Co-Director, UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, responds to a March 5th article and warns of the potential dangers of injecting stem cells into the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. He writes that human clinical trials for such procedures require close regulation, extensive pre-clinical research, and that no one should pay for such expiremential treatments. According to Dr. Grill, “We cannot and must not sacrifice the integrity of the scientific process or the need for ethical research.”

A March 28, 2017 UPI article focused on a new report, published in the Annals of Neurology, revealing the enormous costs of neurological disorders in the US, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. They are projected to increase exponentially by 2050. An action plan to address these costs would require infrastructure investment in neurological research and enhanced clinical management of neurological disorders.

According to a March 28, 2017 Bloomberg BNA article, NIH Director, Francis Collins, isn’t too worried about the proposed 2018 budgetary cuts. “We shouldn’t get too concerned at the moment about the need to shrink the [NIH] enterprise,” he said. NIH has traditionally enjoyed bipartisan support, and they’re hoping to pass legislation in April providing additional 2017 biomedical research funding.

RESEARCH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

A March 27, 2017 Science Daily article highlights the search by Austrian scientists at MedUni Vienna for specific biomarkers for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. According to Peter Dal-Bianco, Alzheimer's expert from MedUni Vienna, “There is a specific biomarker -- we just haven't found it yet." The future goal is to screen people in risk groups from the age of 35 and diagnose disease with 100% certainty.