MUST READS AND LISTEN 

An April 23, 2015 The Hill article reported on “glimmers of bipartisanship over increasing medical research funding” during a Thursday Senate Appropriations subcommittee meeting with HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell. According to the article, “A more prominent topic at the hearing was funding for medical research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “I’m pleased that the department has requested a billion-dollar increase for NIH,” the panel’s Republican chairman, Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), said in his opening remarks. Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, likewise called for increasing NIH funding, noting that former Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich had written an op-ed this week also calling for an increase. “I rarely ever praise Newt Gingrich, but I’m going to,” Durbin said. He called for a bipartisan effort to increase NIH funding by 5 percent, adjusted for inflation, over 10 years.” 

An April 23, 2015 Time magazine interview with Seth Rogen highlighted his commitment to raising Alzheimer’s awareness. According to Rogen, “From my perspective, it’s more about changing the conversation so that the government actually does something about it. I think the government is reactive to people’s desires as opposed to leading the way for people’s best interest. I think that people want to get elected and they want to stay in power, and if it seems like people care about something, then they appeal to that thing, you know? So that’s our real goal, is to make it that Alzheimer’s is the type of thing that people in government have to support to make the general population happy.”

Must Listen: An April 23, 2015 New York Academy of Sciences Podcastintroduced a new “five-part Dementia Decoded podcast series looks at what Alzheimer's is, how it differs from other forms of Dementia, and whether is it an inevitable part of aging.”

CAREGIVING PERSPECTIVES

An April 23, 2015 PBS NewsHour Making Sen$e article highlighted advice two caregivers “wished they had known when caring for parents (and grandparents) with dementia.” According to the article, “PS: One thing that just occurs to me now is that I didn’t want to acknowledge the extent to which my dad had lost it, because it was only episodic and I had such an investment in bringing him back to the dad I knew. KM: Yeah. You’re not alone. That’s the greatest loss that everybody feels. He’s not who he once was. She’s not who she once was. She’s not the mother; he’s not the husband; not the man I married. The reality is, he wasn’t the man you married 10 years after your marriage. He wasn’t the man you married 20 years later. But we love people, not because of what they do for us — I mean, a lot of our relationships are just, “I love you because of who you are. “And so we tend to lose sight of that when we have to be giving so much more…”

RESEARCH, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY

An April 23, 2015 Fortune Magazine article highlighted Biogen’s efforts to beat Alzheimer’s. According to the article, “And though the Alzheimer’s research community was perhaps not as breathless as some investors, many were more excited than they’d ever been about a drug trial. Of the 25 academic and industry researchers interviewed for this story, few did not note Biogen’s study results with enthusiasm. “If the treatment’s clinical benefit is confirmed, it would be a game changer in the scientific fight against Alzheimer’s,” says Eric Reiman, executive director of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute. Says Brian Basckai, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who has studied the effect of adu in mice: “This is the most successful clinical trial in Alzheimer’s disease ever.””

An April 23, 2015 CBS DFW article and broadcast segment reported on the use of ultrasound “to destroy the brain plaque blamed for lost cognitive function.” According to the article, ““We were very excited after finding that not only could the ultrasound improve the memory of these mice,” says Gerhard Leinenga, a final year PhD student and researcher involved in the study, “but also reduced these amyloid plaques which very few treatments that have been tried so far have been able to do.” After the ultrasound treatments, the mice were able to navigate mazes again – and solve problems that had perplexed them before. So far, the technique has only been tried on mice and researchers know they have much to learn. They are nevertheless confident that the technology that gave us sonograms, has the potential to give so much more.”

CLINICAL TRIALS

An April 23, 2015 Forbes article highlighted TrialReach and its goal of enrolling patients in clinical trials faster. According to the article, “Novartis, Pfizer and Eli Lilly are publicly turning over today their technology at a conference in Boston to a London-based start-up called TrialReach. No matter that its founder, Argentinian-born Pablo Graiver was a foreigner to pharma. “We wanted to make sure we have a partner willing to maintain openness around data to make it broadly accessible to patients and app developers,” says Craig Lipset, head of clinical innovation at Pfizer. Graiver, a successful tech entrepreneur, decided to address bottlenecks in clinical trials at the suggestion of a family doctor friend. He founded TrialReach six years ago to facilitate patients’ access to trial information. It is amassing thousands of clinical studies from various sources, including the National Institutes of Health ’s ClinicalTrials.gov and the World Health Organization, and standardizing language in trial protocols so that its search engine can understand, for instance, that T2DM and diabetes mellitus 2 mean the same thing.”