Brain diseases such as dementia, Parkinson’s, depression and hundreds of others remain stubbornly hard to treat, much less prevent or cure. Biomedically speaking, the brain is a tough nut to crack, so much so that pharmaceutical companies frequently avoid the category altogether, not wishing to invest R&D dollars in avenues unlikely to yield marketable drugs and therapies.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t desperately need treatments for brain disorders: According to a recent World Health Organization report, brain diseases are collectively the largest cause of disability worldwide, with an estimated (and staggering) 3.4 billion people living with one of the many such conditions. In other words, almost every family will likely be included in those statistics.
The trend in recent decades has not been good, either. Overall, disability, illness and premature death caused by neurological conditions has increased by 18% since 1990. And as populations age in the U.S. and elsewhere, the number of people living with severely burdensome diseases like Alzheimer’s is expected to skyrocket — unless scientists can start to make the kind of advances that medicine has achieved during the last century in fields like cardiovascular or infectious disease.
Here’s the better news: Relatively new research tools and knowledge are enabling biomedical scientists to better understand and intervene in the brain. Neuroscience is kind of on a roll — and a number of philanthropic funders are helping drive that progress. But the field is facing the same funding crises — old and new — as the rest of biomedical research. This year, the Trump administration’s cuts to biomedical research dollars flowing out of the NIH and other agencies, its war on the universities where research takes place, and its overall hostage-taking of science for political purposes threatens to stymie the development of needed brain therapies and drugs.
With future federal commitments uncertain and corporate funding still scarce, foundations and private donors large and small will become a bigger part of the picture here — as well as funders like the American Brain Foundation, which has launched new backing for one promising avenue in a research field with high potential, high barriers and high stakes.
A key to unlock many cures: How ABF’s backing neuroinflammation research
The American Brain Foundation — a 501c3 fueled by individual and corporate donations — has invested about $47 million in research across the spectrum of brain disease since its establishment in 1992 as the philanthropic partner of the American Academy of Neurology. In 2024, ABF made about $2.4 million in grants and about $5.3 million the previous year.
Now more than ever, ABF is working to maintain momentum in brain research. Among its key funding programs is the Cure One, Cure Many Award, launched in partnership with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and related organizations in 2022 to study Lewy body dementia.
This year, ABF has refocused the Cure One, Cure Many award on the topic of neuroinflammation, a complicating factor in nearly every brain disease. ABF believes that better understanding of the neuroinflammation process could have a uniquely valuable bang for the buck — potentially leading to therapies to treat or even prevent many brain ailments.
Central to the Cure One, Cure Many funding approach is support for cross-discipline and cross-specialty research — which is one of those things in research that’s easier said than done. “We want to stimulate moonshots, and we want to do that through breaking down silos between patients, physicians, research physicians and basic scientists, and people who don’t wear traditional neuroscience hats, like engineers and computer scientists,” said Stephen Hauser, chair of the ABF’s neuroinflammation initiative.
Neuroinflammation is a powerful umbrella subject for ABF’s initiative, says Hauser, in large part because of the numerous autoimmune brain diseases that trigger inflammation, which leads to impacts on brain health and cognitive function. “There are so many diseases where the immune system is primary and the target is the nervous system,” he said.
Autoimmune disease is a particular affliction of modern humans: Our immune systems evolved to function in the hunter-gatherer world of thousands of years ago, yet the environment and our relationship to it is vastly different now, contributing to a variety of immune system dysfunctions. And beyond autoimmune conditions, there are many other diseases caused by injury or infections that directly or indirectly lead to neuroinflammation and affect brain function, such as the brain fog caused by that recent addition to the list of medical bummers, COVID-19.
ABF has so far raised about $6 million for the neuroinflammation award but is continuing to seek additional donations toward an initial goal of $10 million, Hauser said. Final funding decisions have yet to be made, but the ABF expects to fund somewhere around a half-dozen research projects. As likely evidence of both the scientific excitement around neuroinflammation and the sudden dearth of federal dollars, ABF received more than 500 applications for the Cure One, Cure Many initiative.
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Fighting the brain drain: the threat of receding support for early-career researchers
Cure One, Cure Many is also designed to assist early-career researchers, whose professional pathways have always come with an element of uncertainty, but are particularly vulnerable today. The disruption of the Trump cuts flows down to early-career scientists: fewer funded research studies mean fewer research jobs, and the least experienced can be the first to go. That has already sparked a brain drain that’s hitting American science, with many recently minted academic scientists seeking more secure employment in Canada and Europe. If that pattern continues, a loss of talent will weaken the American research community and threaten the country’s global research leadership.
“The dollars available for biomedical science are really paltry, and young people, especially in times of stress, see this as a signal that this isn’t a secure career,” Hauser said. “China is going to eat our lunch if we don’t continue to build a scientific infrastructure in the United States that’s secure, and that very talented young people want to continue to participate in and take the baton from the gray hairs.”
Hauser’s own trajectory pays testament to the need for early-career support and the dividends it can pay. The medical doctor and researcher is currently director of the University of California, San Francisco Weill Institute for Neurosciences. He has also been a pioneer in the development of treatments for the neurodegenerative disease multiple sclerosis — a path that was launched in part by an early-career grant of $90,000 from an individual philanthropist back in 1980.
“That small gift led to 40 years of progress against multiple sclerosis, resulting in therapies that are astoundingly effective and that have transformed the lives for a million people with MS in America alone,” he said. The drugs have also made billions for the pharmaceutical company that brought them to market — an example of the economic value of biomedical research, and of the way philanthropy and for-profit investment are often intertwined in the health science research space. Given the massive future market for therapies for the brain diseases of old age, one hopes the corporate funders steering clear of neuroscience will begin to revisit that calculus.
This is not the time to sleep on brain research, but the time to accelerate. “New technologies in engineering, imaging and especially computation and artificial intelligence are making brain diseases more tractable to study, to interrupt and maybe even prevent,” Hauser said. “So it’s not just an aphorism when people say we are entering an age of neuroscience.”
