A $1 million global competition that aims to accelerate Alzheimer’s disease research using AI launched today with support from Bill Gates and others.
The contest is organized by the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative and specifically targets the innovative use of agentic AI, which is artificial intelligence that can behave autonomously, performing reasoning and decision making. The hope is the technology can sift through the massive quantities of research on Alzheimer’s and related dementias to find promising leads that others have missed.
“AI has the potential to revolutionize the pace and scale of dementia research — providing an opportunity we cannot afford to miss out on, especially with so many lives at risk,” said Niranjan Bose, interim executive director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative and managing director for health and life sciences at Gates Ventures, Bill Gates’ private office.
Gates announced the creation of the initiative in November 2020, just months after his father, Bill Gates Sr., died from Alzheimer’s at age 94. The effort is a coalition of advocacy, government, industry and philanthropic organizations working to support diagnostics, treatments and cures for Alzheimer’s and similar diseases.
Gates reflected on the disease in a Father’s Day post this year, noting that more than 7 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s, which works out to 1-in-9 people over the age of 65.
“As life expectancies continue to go up, those numbers will only increase,” Gates said.
Last week Jeff Bezos’ mother, Jackie Bezos, died after battling Lewy Body Dementia, which is the second most common type of dementia after Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s is a difficult medical challenge given that it stems from multiple biological pathways and can have different causes. It took more than 100 years of research before the Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug treatments and blood-based diagnostics targeting the disease, the organization said in announcing the competition.
The winning AI tool will be publicly available for researchers worldwide through the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative’s AD workbench, which supports scientific collaboration and data analyses.
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