The OpenAI Foundation announced a $100 million grant for Alzheimer’s research earlier this week, in partnership with two Bay Area-based research institutes.
The foundation, which operates as the nonprofit arm of OpenAI, will collaborate with six organizations, including the University of California, San Francisco, and Palo Alto-based research nonprofit Arc Institute.
In a news release, the OpenAI Foundation said that since 1960, the mortality rate has fallen for cardiovascular disease, infectious disease, and cancer, but has risen slightly for Alzheimer’s.
Effective treatments remain elusive because multiple factors, like genetics, aberrations in the structure of proteins, inflammation, and neurological dysfunction, cause the disease.
“AI is uniquely suited to confront this complexity,” according to the news release. “Its ability to reason across different types of data, including patient clinical symptoms, biological markers of disease, screens of drug candidates, and more, offers a fundamentally new way to understand how these factors interact, identify appropriate drug targets, and diagnose actionable risks.”
As part of the research program, the Arc Institute will conduct experiments to understand how different health risk factors interact with each other to cause Alzheimer’s. The data collected from multiple iterations of such experiments will then be used to train AI models to arrive at the most likely effective interventions.
UCSF, on the other hand, will focus on using AI to analyze information from patients’ blood and other biomarkers to improve diagnosis and streamline clinical trials in the future.
“Progress, in Alzheimer’s research, depends on connecting scientific breakthroughs with the care of our patients,” said S. Andrew Josephson, Professor and Chair of Neurology at UCSF, in the news release. “With AI helping us integrate these insights and make sense of tremendous complexity, we have an opportunity to accelerate discoveries that could meaningfully change patients’ lives.”
The $100 million grant is part of the OpenAI Foundation’s larger plan to invest $1 billion towards research in the life sciences and curing disease, the economic impact of AI, and other community programs.