Bill Gates Launches $1M AI Competition to Accelerate Alzheimer's Research

Bill Gates-backed AI competition offers $1M to accelerate Alzheimer's research

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.

Bill Gates Launches $1M A.I. Competition to Tackle Alzheimer's

Gates is calling on global innovators to harness A.I. against the growing Alzheimer's crisis. More than 7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer's disease -- a figure expected to rise as life expectancies increase. To help accelerate progress, Bill Gates and a coalition of partners are backing a new A.I. competition designed to spur breakthroughs in Alzheimer's and related dementia research. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters Unveiled today (Aug. 19) by the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative), the competition will award a $1 million prize to a team that successfully utilizes agentic A.I. to develop innovative solutions. The resulting tools will be made publicly available through the AD Data Initiative's online research environment. "The Alzheimer's Insights A.I. Prize is our call to the global innovation system to act with urgency," said Niranjan Bose, interim executive director of the AD Data Initiative, in a statement. "A.I. 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," added Bose, who also serves as managing director for health and life sciences at Gates Ventures, the family office funding the competition. For Gates, the mission is deeply personal. He helped launch the AD Data Initiative in 2020, just months after his father died at age 94 from the disease. "We are closer than ever before to a world where no one has to watch someone they love suffer from this awful disease," said Gates in a Father's Day post this year, calling for faster progress in Alzheimer's research. How can A.I. help? Alzheimer's is a particularly complex disease, with multiple potential causes and a web of biological pathways that have long stymied researchers. Agentic A.I. is well-suited to tackling these challenges because it can autonomously analyze large amounts of data and catch insights that human researchers might miss, according to the AD Data Initiative. Beyond data analysis, A.I. could also transform the very nature of Alzheimer's research. "A.I. is opening the door for a shift from reactive to predictive research -- identifying novel biomarkers of early disease patterns, optimizing clinical trial designs, and revealing unexpected opportunities for drug creation and repurposing," said Gregory Moore, senior advisor at both Gates Ventures and the AD Data Initiative, in a statement. Over the years, Gates has poured billions into public health initiatives via his charitable foundation. But his Alzheimer's work has largely come from his personal fortune, which currently stands at around $118.3 billion. His donations include a $50 million gift to support novel treatments, another $50 million toward clinical trials and early detection and $30 million to create an initiative focused on improving diagnostics. Now, with the new competition, Gates is widening the call for innovation. Applications open today for A.I. and machine learning engineers, computational biomedicine experts, tech companies, clinical specialists and Alzheimer's researchers. Semi-finalists will be announced in December, with finalists competing next March at the Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease Conference in Copenhagen.