Alzheimer's disease affects a growing number of people. The cure has remained frustratingly elusive for years. Researche | dG1fNVBWcFBOXzhiSDQ
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Short filmTranscript
00:00Repeat after me. Apple. Table. Penny. Apple.
00:21The effort to develop a treatment for Alzheimer's suffered a blow yesterday when a clinical
00:25trial at least a decade in the making was halted. Today there are more people over 80 than ever
00:32before. In 2050 there will be 32 million seniors, triple what it is today, and one out of every two
00:41of us will have Alzheimer's disease. I lost both grandmothers. My granddad had it. My father-in-law.
00:47An uncle. My dad. My mother has Alzheimer's so I may have it. He didn't know my kids when they
00:54came to visit him. And can we get there soon enough? No one's ever done this before. Nobody's
00:59come up with a disease modifying medication for Alzheimer's. You give a new medicine to somebody,
01:05it takes a long time to see whether that medicine's going to have any effect. And 99.6 percent of all
01:10Alzheimer's trials failed. I still remember just feeling my heart sink. I actually had to leave
01:17the room. I was just numb. I've never seen a study that just missed on so many measures.
01:24But then we kept looking. We said, well look, the studies weren't designed just to look at
01:29patients with mild disease. And we looked at each other and kept saying, you all have something here
01:36don't you? He said, we have a drug. So there's excitement and there's hope. Two words you never
01:42hear with Alzheimer's. My four-year-old's drilling into superheroes and he saw an interview that I
01:47had done where I was in the lab, had the lab coat on, and he just said, Daddy, you're a scientist.
01:52And I never realized this, almost every superhero starts off as a scientist.
01:56They're not in a spotlight, but they have heroic characters fighting against all odds.
02:02Imagine the impact if we could change the course of Alzheimer's disease.
02:06Just because we think the brain is more complex than the universe itself doesn't mean it is.
02:11It just doesn't feel that way yet. This is the final frontier in medicine.
02:16We have to find the cure. Failure is not an option.