New global partnership aims to accelerate dementia drug discovery

Alzheimer's Society and Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) are offering up to $1.5 million to new research projects which could speed up developing treatments for Alzheimer's and dementia.

The international collaboration could help make the hope of finding effective dementia treatments within the next 10 years a reality.

Focusing on drug repurposing and repositioning, the new call for proposals aims to take drugs that already exist for other conditions and develop them as dementia treatments. Currently it can take up to 20 years and around a billion dollars to develop a new drug from scratch, but by using existing drugs, the partners hope to deliver treatments far sooner and at a fraction of the cost.

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Where Memories Go is a tender portrait by Sally Magnusson of her mum’s frustration with dementia

Do the words ‘to lose a parent’ mean something different to the children of dementia sufferers?

Mamie Baird Magnusson died in April, 2012, aged 86. Her children had already been grappling with her loss for more than a decade. The warm, sparky, strong and inquisitive woman who had piloted their lives had gradually receded from view as dementia dimmed her sharp mind.

In her place was a frail old lady, in need of round-the-clock care, whose frustration at her failure to comprehend the world around her sometimes manifested itself in anger, even anguish.

For those who had known her, dementia seemed a particularly cruel end-of-life sentence for a woman whose lively intellect had been her passport to success. Mamie Baird had been a star writer on the Scottish Daily Express.

The joke when she married her junior colleague Magnus Magnusson – who would later find fame as the original Mastermind inquisitor – was that he was after her job.

‘She loved words and taught her children to cherish them, too,’ writes her broadcaster daughter, Sally. ‘Then, little by little, she lost them.’

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