Explore key milestones and see how our researchers are improving lives.

BrightFocus was founded on May 15, 1973. Our charter was to fund research to find cures for the most pressing health problems.

BrightFocus funded early research supporting the artificial heart, one of the long-sought holy grails of modern medicine, and provided critical early funding to Dr. Willem Kolff, a Dutch physician known as the father of artificial organs. Dr. Kolff led the team that worked on the artificial heart that was implanted into 61-year-old Barney Clark in 1982 and designed the first artificial kidney.

Scientists including Alzheimer’s Disease Research grantees Drs. Rudolph Tanzi, Gerard Schellenberg, John Hardy, and Peter St. George-Hyslop discover a new area of chromosome 14 associated with familial Alzheimer’s disease, setting the stage for an improved understanding of hereditary genes for Alzheimer’s.

BrightFocus helped established Alzheimer’s research programs in the Netherlands (1993), Germany (1995), and Belgium (1995), broadening philanthropic support for Alzheimer’s research internationally.

Grantee Stanley Prusiner, MD, was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking discovery and definition of prions, infectious proteins in the brain that cause mad cow disease in cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. There are similarities between the loss of brain function in prion diseases and in Alzheimer’s disease, and an understanding of how prion diseases begin and develop may one day lead to a treatment and a cure for Alzheimer’s. Dr. Prusiner served as co-chair of our Alzheimer’s Disease Research Scientific Review Committee and became an honorary BrightFocus board member in 2007. In 2010, President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Science, the country’s highest honor for science and technology.

A 1986 Alzheimer’s Disease Research grant led Paul Greengard, PhD, to initiate a series of milestone experiments into protein phosphorylation in specific brain regions related to Alzheimer’s disease. His most famous discovery, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics or Medicine in 2000, is that nerve cells communicate with each other through chemical and electrical signaling working in tandem, known as signal transduction. This discovery laid the foundations of modern neuroscience.

Research funded by Macular Degeneration Research helped lay the foundation for the discovery and understanding of the complement pathway, part of the immune system, and its involvement in onset of age-related macular degeneration.

Grantee Joel Schuman, MD, and his team create the first noninvasive technique to measure eye pressure—the most important factor to consider in glaucoma. For the first time, scientists can visualize and measure how fast drainage in the front of the eye occurs without touching the eye and without any bright lights.

Macular Degeneration Research grantees Sarah Doyle, PhD, Matthew Campbell, PhD, and others in Dublin, Ireland, discover that the inflammatory marker IL-18 could be used to prevent wet AMD and lead to a better understanding of how the immune system could be managed to reduce vision loss.

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BrightFocus convenes the first national research summit on dementia caregiving, recognizing the evidence behind home-based dementia care as a critical component of care services for people with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias in the coming decades.

A collaborative grant awarded in 2020 to Quincy Samus, PhD, would later advance the dissemination and translation of MIND at Home, an evidence‐based dementia care coordination model, into practice.

Grantee Jeffrey Goldberg, MD, PhD, leads a BrightFocus-funded, first-of-its-kind Phase 2 clinical trial to test a new glaucoma treatment consisting of an experimental cell therapy to protect the optic nerve. In this innovative approach, a capsule is implanted in the eye that delivers a steady stream of growth factors to protect damage to the optic nerve, which could possibly improve vision in patients with glaucoma.

The launch of Rhopressa, the first approved rho-associated protein kinase (ROCK) inhibitor—fueled by early BrightFocus-funded research—represents the first entirely new class of glaucoma medication to become available in more than two decades, since the first prostaglandin analog drug was approved in 1996. Early work by BrightFocus grantee Haiyan Gong, MD, PhD, proved this class of drugs could relieve eye pressure.

Grantee Huda Y. Zoghbi, MD, wins a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her discoveries of the genetic causes and biochemical mechanisms of two rare inherited neurodegenerative diseases, spinocerebellar ataxia and Rett syndrome. These findings help scientists better understand other neurodegenerative and neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, and led Dr. Zoghbi to pursue dementia research, for which she was later awarded a BrightFocus grant.

Grantee Jerome Mertens, PhD, successfully reprograms cultured skin cells from Alzheimer’s patients directly into brain neurons, creating a brain model that is not only genetically unique to each patient but also biologically “remembers” the age of the individual. This research could lead to giving Alzheimer’s neurons their own memory back, paving the way for therapeutics to prevent or treat the disease.

C2N Diagnostics introduces the first widely accessible blood test in the U.S. to identify early signs of Alzheimer’s disease. After receiving ritical early support from BrightFocus, the PrecivityAD blood test received an FDA “Breakthrough Device” designation, paving the way for new treatments for earlier and better patient care.

Learn more about the newest version of the blood test.

By screening Alzheimer’s through the eye, a research team led by grantee Amir Kashani, MD, PhD, finds that changes in blood flow and vessel density in the eye may be an indicator of problems with blood circulation in the brain, signaling the risk of cognitive decline from Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. By bridging eye and brain research, BrightFocus grantees are pursuing a bold “what-if” science that could provide earlier detection and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.

Watch Dr. Kashani discuss recent research to diagnose vascular dementia through retinal scans.

Researchers, including grantee Petr Baranov, MD, PhD, and team at Harvard Medical School, successfully transplant—for the first time—lab-grown retinal ganglion cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells into the eyes of mice. Based on this work, researchers estimate that people with late-stage glaucoma could begin receiving vision-restoring transplants in the next 10 years.

Led by grantee Thomas Karikari, PhD, a research team identifies a less frequently measured biomarker of tau in the blood, BD-tau, that positively correlates with neurodegeneration and cognitive impairment before symptoms begin. BD-tau outperforms existing blood tests used to detect Alzheimer’s-related neurodegeneration and could lead to earlier and more accurate Alzheimer’s diagnoses.

Grantee Ganesh Babulal, PhD, develops a first-of-its-kind driving test that can identify Alzheimer’s disease before other symptoms appear. By evaluating driving behavior, the team detects subtle changes in cognition that might be missed by traditional testing.

BrightFocus-funded scientists including J. Crawford Downs, PhD, develop a new implantable device that could change the way glaucoma is diagnosed. The wireless device measures intraocular eye pressure and a variety of pressure parameters in the eye.

A team of Hong Kong scientists led by grantee Carol Cheung, PhD, develops a faster way to screen for Alzheimer’s disease using an AI model that reads retina scans. This highly accurate method could enable people, who would receive their results immediately, to benefit from early intervention and treatment.