Gates Injects UK-US Dementia Discovery Fund With $50m And Fresh Purpose
Executive Summary
The Dementia Discovery Fund won a $50m private investment from Bill Gates – plus his ringing support to probe beyond the amyloid beta hypothesis in hopes of eventually defeating Alzheimer's.
Efforts for a wider, joined-up search for novel therapies to tackle dementia have been boosted by Bill Gates making a personal $50m investment in the UK-US venture fund, the Dementia Discovery Fund and promising his future support in its exploration of less mainstream approaches to treating the condition.
The fund which Gates is backing was launched in 2015, and grew out of a dementia consortium that brought together academic and industry researchers formed following the 2013 G8 Dementia Summit, at which the UK pledged to double funding for research in this area to £132m by 2025.
Managed by SV Health, the DDF now has a portfolio of 12 investments in drug discovery companies and projects, mostly located in the UK and US in areas that include mitochondrial dynamics, inflammation, microglial function, synaptic physiology and structure, and membrane contact biology.
Gates Backing DDF Mission
The DDF's approach has now attracted the interest and personal financial backing of Bill Gates.
Writing in his personal blog on Nov 13, the now-retired Microsoft founder said that "as a first step, I’ve invested $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund – a private fund working to diversify the clinical pipeline and identify new targets for treatment."
He added, "Most of the major pharmaceutical companies continue to pursue the amyloid and tau pathways. DDF complements their work by supporting startups as they explore less mainstream approaches to treating dementia."
Gates said his investment in DDF was a private one and not through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "The first Alzheimer’s treatments might not come to fruition for another decade or more, and they will be very expensive at first. Once that day comes, our foundation might look at how we can expand access in poor countries," he said.
DDF Banking On 'The Gates Effect'
DDF's chief science officer told Scrip the potential impact of Gates support and future involvement would be hugely important for the venture fund, whose backers also comprise the UK government’s Department of Health, the charity Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK), and pharmaceutical companies that include GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Biogen,Johnson & Johnson,Eli Lilly & Co., Pfizer Inc. and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.
"If all things go well, we should at least by 2025 have an idea of some new treatments that are on their way to becoming useful therapies in dementia through the DDF." - Dementia Discovery Fund's Chief Science Officer Tetsu Maruyama
"Bill Gates is eager to bring not just his money to this but also his presence and his own network and the influence that he has today to this cause," said Tetsu Maruyama, Chief Scientific Officer for DDF.
"We feel that Alzheimer's will benefit from the increased profile he will bring – the reduction in stigma about dementia that still exists. Also, sometimes we lack the ability to bring together people from disparate fields – whether it's digital technology that will allow us to have better biomarkers, better diagnostics – to simply share data better, and I think Bill Gates will be an incredible ally in overcoming such barriers to success."
Tetsu Maruyama, DDF CSO
Dementia Discovery Fund
The investment in the DDF is Gates’ first to accelerate progress toward disease-modifying therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. The DDF is hoping to deliver over all funding of around £230m in its first five years of operations
DDF CSO Explains Approach
Maruyama has been chief scientific officer for the Dementia Discovery Fund for 18 months. (Also see "DDF's New CSO Will Get Dementia Discovery 'Out Of A Rut'" - Scrip, 29 Jan, 2016.)
Prior to that he was head of global drug discovery for five years at Takeda Pharmaceuticals in Japan. He worked at other Big Pharma groups before that, including GSK and Merck & Co. Inc. and was an academic for 15 years before joining the industry.
"My specialty was in basic mechanisms of learning and memory and that naturally led into dementia." The possible promise of cross-fertilization in this field became evident, he said, when Takeda expanded its portfolio of therapeutic areas; "at which point I began to see the possibilities of borrowing learnings and exchanging them between those areas, a process which doesn't happen often enough."
But DDF's operations do not extend to active R&D. Rather, it's more of an incubator for promising therapies.
Instead, the DDF benefits from the expertise of its scientific advisory board which includes heads of neuroscience and/or R&D from seven big pharma companies. The SAB provides ongoing advice and knowledge, offers insights on different approaches and historical failures, suggests priority areas to explore, new approaches to treat dementia and advises on strategies to drugging these new pathways.
Maruyama thus has a very small team of scientists located in Boston, Massachusetts or London, who act as scouts – he calls them "Entrepreneurs-in-Residence" or EIRs, to identify promising new ideas, while the DDF's fund's associated scientists are tapped by the team for their insights in assessing promising science.
"We don't have anyone in the labs. We are a venture capital fund. We are investing our money essentially into other people's labs and very early companies or what we call 'projects' that we believe can grow into companied."
"Our scientists are here to recognize and understand the novel science and to help guide these new projects and companies as they come in. Each EIR is a scientist who works with other scientists in these projects or companies to make them work successfully," Maruyama said.
While diagnostics are part of the process in finding therapies to treat dementia, it will not be an investment area for the DDF.
"We are very supportive of diagnostics and have had discussions with people including Bill Gates' team about what we might do to help develop various types of diagnostics that could help us. Clearly, along with finding new targets for treating dementia we need to understand dementia better. We need to understand how to diagnose it, we need to understand how to measure it both in clinical trials and in real world. But we're not going to invest directly in diagnostic companies right now. We are only investing directly in therapeutics."
What the DDF wants to do is develop dementia-related expertise in these unexplored therapeutics areas, "because we think the link between that biology and dementia is going to get stronger," Maruyama added.
"Take as an example microglial biology. We want to learn how to engage targets around microglial function that are going to be applicable across a range of dementia's including Alzheimer's.
"We have four areas of focus – mitochondrial dynamics, inflammation, microglial function, synaptic physiology and structure, and then membrane contact biology. These are areas that have had an importance to immunology, autoimmune diseases to cancer to heart disease to muscle diseases, and so a reasonable amount is known about them, but we haven't yet applied them to dementias in the way that we think we can."
"What we're doing is very ambitious – but we haven't had to invent the whole field from scratch. What we are suggesting is that we're aware of these things and that out there in the world are people with expertise who may be doing oncology right now but and don't yet realize that they could make a huge difference if they started working in dementia. We're looking to bring some of those people into the effort," he said.
2025 Is First Therapy Target Date
Maruyama hopes the DDF can bring its first therapies to market by 2025.
"We are working to the 2025 target date that was set by the G8 Dementia Summit which kicked off this whole effort. That date is a bit of a stretch but our first investment, in the privately-held immuno-neurology focused Alector, is going to be bringing in partnership with AbbVie two new molecules into the clinic, probably next year."
"So, if all things go well, we should at least by 2025 have an idea of some new treatments that are on their way to becoming useful therapies in dementia through the DDF," Maruyama said.