November 5th, 2018
San Antonio — A Texas billionaire is funding a new competition that will
give $4 million to seven individuals who present promising ideas about the
cause of Alzheimer’s disease and say they’ll work to prove it.
Called the Oskar Fischer Project, the program
will give the grand prize winner $2 million of the total, while two others
receive $500,000 each, and four more get $250,000 apiece. To top it off, the
money comes without requirements to complete the project or to make specific
determinations. While the goal of the project is for the winners to look into
the causes of Alzheimer’s—and the founders of the project may check in with the
winners at some point—the funding is given to them outright, with the aim of
giving them more freedom to focus on determining the potential basis Alzheimer’s
disease. The program is open anyone, not just scientists, and no previous track
record in Alzheimer’s research is required. Applicants just need to present a
proposal.
It is unusual, and potentially risky, to give
such a substantial award to someone, especially without requiring any specific
milestones or markers. James Truchard, who is providing the money to fund the
project, says he’s not worried because he’s in a position to take this kind of
risk.
“I don’t have a profession to defend or a reputation
to keep,” Truchard says, speaking in a phone interview. “If I lose my
reputation because I give the prize to somebody that doesn’t have a great idea,
I’m willing to take that risk.”
Truchard is the co-founder of Austin-based National Instruments, a
company that reportedalmost $1.3 billion of net sales in 2017 of the
software and hardware it makes for scientists and engineers to use in
instrumentation testing. Truchard, who trained as an electrical engineer,
retired from his roles as president and CEO in 2017, but remains chairman of
the company, which he co-founded in 1976 while he was working full-time at the
University of Texas at Austin.
Truchard, 75, has a personal connection to the
issue; his first wife, Lee, had vascular dementia, and died in 2012 from a brain
aneurysm. He started learning about neurodegenerative diseases and wanted to do
more. Truchard doesn’t have any training in biology or neuroscience—and the
applicants for the prizes don’t need to either. The winners will be picked
based on their ability to demonstrate they might be able to meet the project’s
goal. Truchard says he believes an individual who takes a multidisciplinary
approach may be able to find something in the troves of scientific research and
data that others haven’t seen.
“It is a complex problem so you’re going to
need somebody who can really think across the boundaries,” Truchard says. “I’m
hoping there’s some genius somewhere that can put all the pieces of the puzzle
together and come up with a good explanation.”
The University of Texas at San Antonio is
administering the project, and received a $5 million gift from Truchard to
establish it. Truchard is doing similar work at other universities including UT
Austin, Baylor, and UCLA, funding more than 10 research projects that look into
everything from bacteria and viruses to infrared lights. He does that work
under the name the Oskar Fischer Project, and is loaning the name to UTSA for
the Alzheimer’s challenge. In May, it was announced that he was joining The Paul G. Allen
Frontiers Group and the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association
in committing $43 million to fund a separate Alzheimer’s project.
For the San Antonio project, about $1 million
of the $5 million gift is being used to advertise and administer the project,
according to George Perry, an
Alzheimer’s researcher and the chief scientist at the UTSA
Brain Health Consortium, who is heading the Oskar Fischer Project in San
Antonio. Perry says he plans to make a call for proposals in February 2019. He
and a group of other researchers (many will come from Texas) will review the
proposals to determine who is selected.
Winners probably won’t be selected for a
while: The plan is to promote the Oskar Fischer Project around the world for
the next year, if not longer, to draw the largest pool of applicants. The
selection committee would hopefully select winners by the end of year two,
says Perry, who is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of
Alzheimer’s Disease. Further details are still being developed.
Both Perry and Truchard say that the idea is a
bit unusual, but they argue their approach may bring better results.
Researchers and drug companies have spent billions of dollars annually on
Alzheimer’s R&D, with little to show for it in terms of new and effective
drugs. But Perry and Truchard say that it could take an outsider to finally
figure it out (of course, traditional researchers may be selected in the end).
They want someone to analyze the composite of all Alzheimer’s
knowledge—countless pages of published Alzheimer’s research, consideration of
existing and potential therapies and treatments—to look for meaning where
experts may have previously not. That might mean someone who is not a
biologist—an engineer, a business consultant, a Swiss patent officer—could be
the right fit.
“We want it to be open for anyone in the
world, no matter what their education, if they can bring new ideas,” Perry
says. “If you look at Einstein, he pulled together insights that were not
obvious, and he was working at a patent office. We would like to have someone,
who now works at the equivalent of the patent office, not be restricted because
they don’t have exceptional academic credentials.”
If this bristles feathers in the research
community, Perry isn’t worried. His degrees are in zoology and marine biology,
but he’s spent most of his career researching Alzheimer’s disease, particularly
the impact of oxidative damage in the brain. He has long questioned one area in
Alzheimer’s research that has been the most studied: the so-called
“amyloid hypothesis.”
Scientists have
long theorized that the buildup of bits of protein in
patients’ brains, specifically beta amyloid, may be the cause of the disease,
and numerous drugs have been developed to attack and remove the protein.
They’ve all failed in clinical tests. (Results from a
Phase 2 trial of one drug still being developed were
released in July, which were and remain
controversial.) Perry has been publicly skeptical of the
hypothesis dating as far back as 2000, when he says he published a paper in
Nature (it’s now available on The Lancet) called “Amyloid-β junkies.”
More people are now siding with him, believing the protein may be a symptom of the
disease and not a cause.
While the project may still fund people
examining amyloid, Perry says he and his team will want a more comprehensive
look at other areas of Alzheimer’s being studied. That includes everything from
the potential impact of infectious agents like microbes, viruses, or bacteria
to whether environmental toxins from aluminum to copper may impact the
development of Alzheimer’s, among others.
“All this complexity should be able to be
reduced to something that’s simpler and easier to digest for the human mind,
and therefore you’d be more likely to be able to develop therapeutics that can
benefit families,” Perry says. “Everyone has been looking for a cure, to get a
home run, when in fact, if we could just hit a single, if we could just delay
the disease by five years, it would have a tremendous impact for people that
are here now.”
Truchard says funding research like this keeps
him engaged after his retirement. His research into the disease led him to
discover Oskar Fischer, a Czech neuroscientist who was a contemporary of Alios
Alzheimer, the man the disease is named for. Alzheimer is famous not only for
lending his name to the disease, but for his early work in studying the protein
plaques that clog the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Fischer did similar work
at around the same time.
Truchard is naming this project after Fischer
to recognize Fischer’s contribution to the field, which Truchard feels has been
overshadowed by Alios Alzheimer’s work.
Perry says Truchard’s unique take on the
problem will help the field.
“Jim has made a quantum leap,” Perry says.
“He’s a bright person that comes completely from the outside, but has an
engineering background, and [thinks] very different than the way biologists or
most scientists think about most problems.”
An optimist, Truchard says, would believe the
prize will lead to a definitive answer. A pessimist might say the work will
take forever.
“You can take it from there,” Truchard says.
“We hope to come up with really good answers.”
David Holley is
Xconomy's national correspondent based in Austin, TX. You can reach him at dholley@xconomy.com
https://xconomy.com/texas/2018/11/05/win-2-million-to-solve-alzheimers-new-prize-will-reward-fresh-ideas/?single_page=true
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