Today is the first day of July and also a Monday. I had a coffee chat with Yuko, who is the Director of the Aging and Prevention team at ADDF. I asked about what she does day to day. She said 80% is writing and updating reports, and discussing the programs that ADDF is considering funding. Doing the diligence to make sure the drug would actually have the effect that the scientists claim it to have. She and her team need to critically asset how reliant and strong is the evidence. Because grant writers are incentivized to write the product to be as nice as it can be to increase their chance of winning the grant, therefore it is important for the evaluation team to critically assess the validity of the product in an unbiased way to make the decision of who should receive the funding.
Writing a report is one way for the science team at ADDF to stay ahead of the knowledge needed to make funding decisions. ADDF would form their own opinions about certain drugs, food, supplements, and drug targets (A biological target is anything within a living organism to which some other entity is directed and/or binds, resulting in a change in its behavior or function) non-pharmacologic interventions, and risk factors. These reports would guide their decisions in evaluating the programs when they propose a drug or therapeutic.
10% of her work is focused on rating drugs, food, supplements, drug targets, non-pharmacologic interventions, and risk factors. Based on evidence, benefit to the brain, and safety. This could be a place where people can find ratings given by scientists and get trustable facts on what they are taking.
Another 10% of her work is working on the prevention portfolio. She told me that prevention is a lot harder than treatment because, for treatments, you can see the effect of particular therapies or drugs after the treatment, which can be a quick turnout. However, prevention is more long-term because it would start with people who don’t yet have Alzheimer's and wait a couple of years to see its effect.
I also learned that ADDF is different from NIH in giving grants in that NIH uses a score to rate the studies and would fund the studies that pass a certain percentage, but ADDF doesn’t have a cut-off, they use an iterative process to give feedback to the researchers and see if they have room to change their study to make it more promising as a project to fund.
