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Research Overview

"Understanding the role of sex in health and disease is a cornerstone of personalized medicine. The high failure rate of clinical drug trials in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) over the past decade has increased the urgency to better dissect the heterogeneity of AD in order to facilitate more personalized therapies."

Females have been noted to be at the epicenter of the AD epidemic due to the fact that they account for roughly two-thirds of AD patients in the US and also the majority of caregivers. However, despite substantial research investment in AD over decades, the biological role of sex in the neurodegenerative process has been relatively understudied…” *

*Sex Differences in Cognitive Decline in Subjects with High Likelihood of Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease. Murali Doraiswamy, Ph.D., member of the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund Research Leadership Group and Rudolph Tanzi, Ph.D., Chair of the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund Research Leadership group, Scientific Reports, 2018.

In 2016 the National Institutes of Health enacted the landmark SABV (sex as biological variable) policy that requires researchers to consider both sexes in their studies to provide for a more complete understanding of the impact leading to therapies and treatments for disease. 2016!

Cure Alzheimer’s Fund has long identified that understanding sex-based differences are crucial to eventually finding effective therapies for Alzheimer’s disease. Our funded researchers are required to include studies of sex-based differences in their CureAlz studies. And, to facilitate progress in understanding these differences, we have provided male and female material to researchers, including those who have not received grants from CureAlz, for their studies so that progress can be made wherever research is being conducted.

In this section are a number of the funded projects, discoveries, and published papers identifying sex-based differences in the studies of our researchers.