Billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is to invest $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund that brings together industry and government to seek treatments for the brain-wasting disease.
The investment — a personal one and not part of Gates’ philanthropic Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — will be followed by another $50 million in start-up ventures working in Alzheimer’s research, Gates said.
With rapidly rising numbers of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, the disease is taking a growing emotional and financial toll as people live longer, Gates told Reuters in an interview.
