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A leading government science officer addressed BrightFocus grantees attending our annual breakfast sponsored during the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting, which was held in Washington, DC, this week.

More than 250 science journalists covered the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington, DC, this week. Two close colleagues of BrightFocus took part in press conferences to explain new directions in Alzheimer’s research.

In the January 2015 issue of Lancet Neurology, Randall Bateman, MD, reviews top achievements in Alzheimer’s research in 2014. A long-time colleague of BrightFocus and one of our current grantees, Bateman is the Charles F. and Joanne Knight Distinguished Professor of Neurology at the Washington University of St. Louis Medical School.

BrightFocus 2013-14 grantee Crystal Miller, PhD, and her mentor, Bruce Lamb, PhD, both of the Cleveland Clinic, along with Taylor Jay of Case Western Reserve University, are coauthors on a new report that describes the surprising—even counterintuitive—role that a genetic variant associated with the immune system plays in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).

In his blog posted on March 17, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins asks a provocative question: “What Makes Our Brains Human?” He then provides at least a partial answer to that question with the help of some new science out of Yale.

Read about the success from an early clinical trial of the Alzheimer’s drug, aducanumab.

Good news from Yale—researchers there report early success using a still-experimental cancer drug known as saracatinib to treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice.

In two studies receiving international attention, 2013-16 BrightFocus grantee Rik Ossenkoppele, PhD, of Vrije Universiteit (VU) Medical Center, Amsterdam, and colleagues in the Netherlands have lent confidence to our understanding of how Alzheimer’s develops. Their findings help confirm that amyloid beta (Aβ) peptide levels start to build up and aggregate long before Alzheimer’s symptoms develop, and are predictive of disease.

BrightFocus Foundation today announced $11 million in new research grant awards, a record amount for the non-profit in its efforts to cure diseases of mind and sight.