This isn’t the first time Bill Gates has poured money into Alzheimer’s research. Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images
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.
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.
