Dementia Discovery Fund gets $100M from Glaxo, Pfizer, U.K., and more

New Alzheimer's disease investment fund Dementia Discovery Fund, gets $100 million from UK's Department of Health and other leading pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Pfizer Inc., Biogen, Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Takeda, and more.

Bloomberg reported that the fund will be used to further ventures on new approaches to Alzheimer's disease and certain types of dementia, which is a field filled with pharmaceutical failures.

SV Life Sciences Advisers LLP will be managing DDF. Representatives from the various pharmaceutical firms will be part of a scientific advisory board to oversee the team of neuroscientists who will come up with new drugs and diagnostic tools for dementia that will be marketed by 2025.

Channel News Asia wrote that British health minister Jeremy Hunt announced this initiative in March after a Group of Eight nations had a conference in 2013 on matters of treating dementia.

The fund is said to back research projects and other drug makers that are set to develop an effective treatment for dementia, of which Alzheimer's is the most common. The money that will be generated from these projects will be reinvested in the fund.

DDF is an innovative international investment fund created in October 2015. It will collaborate with universities, biotechnology industry, academic institutions, and pharmaceutical industries from all over the world to look for promising novel dementia research projects that need support for further development, in a report by Business Wire.

"We now know a hell of a lot more from the genetics than we did when the industry started looking for Alzheimer's treatments," said SV Life Science managing partner Kate Bingham.

"And the whole area of diagnostic imaging is now much more sophisticated. All the work that's been done so far have been in a very limited set of pathways and approaches."

Dementia affects almost 50 million people all over the world. According to Alzheimer's Disease International, by 2050, that figure is expected to reach 135 million. Current drugs can only ease the symptoms, and there are no concrete treatments to slow its progression yet.