University of Delaware receives historic $13 million grant for Alzheimer’s prevention research
The donation from the Delaware Community Foundation will be used by the university to enroll people, age 45 and older, in a study to track brain health over time.
The University of Delaware recently received a $13.1 million donation over the next five years from the Delaware Community Foundation to research early detection and prevention of Alzheimer’s disease.
The donation is the largest yet to the university’s Delaware Center for Cognitive Aging Research (DECCAR) specifically for Alzheimer’s research.
The money comes from the Paul H. Boerger Fund, established after the commercial real estate owner died in 2017. Boerger left about $30 million of his estate to the Delaware Community Foundation (DCF) for research into preventing and curing Alzheimer’s. His sister had suffered from the disease, which causes dementia and affects nearly 490,000 people in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, according DCF.
A $5 million, five-year grant from Boerger’s fund was awarded to the University of Pennsylvania in 2023 to develop new treatments to target the progression of Alzheimer’s.
The $13.1 million grant to the University of Delaware, announced earlier this month, will help expand a longitudinal study for Alzheimer’s prevention. Researchers started last year with plans to follow roughly 100 participants, and now hope to use the grant money to enroll and track the brain health of five times as many individuals.
Researchers are recruiting adults, age 45 and older, who live within a two-hour drive from the university and have either normal cognitive function or early signs of cognitive aging, said DECCAR director Christopher Martens.
Study participants agree to annual cognitive testing, either in person or through Zoom, that gauges memory, reasoning, attention, and language skills. Every other year, participants undergo blood tests, which identify biomarkers of Alzheimer’s, and an MRI to track changes in their brain over time.
“We want to capture people when they’re on the earlier side of changes in their brain, so that we can understand what the earliest events are and then hopefully with that information, develop intervention strategies that can prevent somebody from developing dementia in the future,” Martens said.
Those interventions can include connecting them to clinical drug trials aiming to slow or stop disease progression or encouraging them to make lifestyle changes.
Martens highlighted new research suggesting that exercise, a healthy diet, and lowering cholesterol and blood pressure can reduce the risk of dementia.
“So if somebody is in midlife and starting to experience some cognitive deficits, changing their lifestyle is the best thing that we have today to help and slow the progression of the disease,” he said.
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The grant money also will enable the university to buy a $3.2 million MRI machine to examine the brain at a much higher resolution. Additionally, the donation will support efforts seeking to develop a blood test to identify biomarkers that could predict Alzheimer’s progression. Right now, there are blood tests that detect biomarkers, such as a protein called amyloid, but don’t predict who will develop Alzheimer’s symptoms, Martens said.