UCI MIND and Maria Shriver’s Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Research Partnership Announcements

The Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement (WAM), founded by Maria Shriver, which is committed to helping researchers discover why two out of every three people with Alzheimer’s disease are women, and its partner, the UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND), one of the nation’s premier Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, have announced the next phase in their partnership, including a new donation, a new grant, and new research results.

According to Shriver, “Historically, women weren’t selected as participants in clinical trials, or as test patients for new medicines, which has left women and the doctors that treat them without any scientific information about women’s bodies and women’s minds for any of the major diseases.  WAM and UCI MIND are working together to solve this crisis, particularly in the area of Alzheimer’s, where women are at more than twice the risk of acquiring the disease.”

UCI MIND Director Dr. Joshua Grill adds “Because women are the most affected population in Alzheimer’s disease, UCI MIND and WAM are conducting critically needed research to learn why this is the case, how the disease develops in women, how its progression can be slowed, and eventually how it may be stopped or prevented.  The complexity of the disease requires as many scientists from as many disciplines as can be mustered to understand women’s brain health on a large scale.”

In 2018, WAM and UCI MIND announced their partnership to create a grant competition to attract top scientists from multi-disciplinary areas of the university’s health and medical programs.

The initiative to fund research through a grant competition, which was the brainchild of Shriver and Grill, is meant to quickly make UCI MIND a national hub for research to understand sex and gender disparities in neurodegenerative disease. Funded through philanthropy, the goal is to offer at least one competition each year.

Three major announcements were recently made:

Inaugural Recipients Achieve an Additional $2 Million in Funding

The recipients of the inaugural UCI MIND and WAM $100,000 seed funding grant challenge were Drs. Matthew Blurton-Jones and Dr. Sunil Gandhi, both Associate Professors of Neurobiology and Behavior at UCI.

Dr. Blurton-Jones announced that their initial results regarding microglia and their difference in males versus females has now earned the team an additional $1.9 million multi-year grant from the National Institutes of Health.  

Dr. Grill noted, “As Maria and I had hoped when we began this partnership 18 months ago, our initiative is already resulting in major new funding at UCI MIND on this important topic. This is exactly what we were anticipating could happen.”

Partnership’s Grant Challenge Program Attracts Large New Donation

The UCI MIND and WAM partnership also announced a new $250,000 donation by the Living Legacy Foundation, presented by Alisha Ballard, Vice President and Executive Director of the Foundation.

“This generous gift will allow us to fund more than one grant in the competition this year, as well as sustain the Initiative into the future” Grill points out.  “More scientists seeking answers will speed our process.  We are grateful to have the support of the Living Legacy Foundation to partner with us in this very important work.”

Year 2 Grant Winner Announced

Now in its second year, WAM and UCI MIND have announced another $100,000 grant winner, Dr. Anshu Agrawal of UCI’s School of Medicine.  She will be researching how sex differences affect inflammatory immune mechanisms, which is a critical element of the research agenda to solve the Alzheimer’s disease puzzle.

“While we are still at the beginning stages of understanding how being a woman affects the risk and impact of Alzheimer’s disease, we are very pleased to have taken these many steps forward in partnering with UCI MIND and with the researchers and the philanthropists who are committed to finding answers,” Shriver said.