Drug Discovery Partnership

AFTD has formed a partnership with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF) of New York to fund the first ever grants for FTD drug discovery. During each of the four years of the partnership (2008-2011), AFTD will contribute $100,000 and ADDF will contribute $200,000 to fund researchers who are working to bridge the gap that exists between basic research in the laboratory, where the goal is to understand the fundamental biological processes that have gone awry, and development of a new therapeutic for clinical testing.


Recipients of the 2009 funding cycle are as follows:

$100,000
Gabriela Chiosis, PhD
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
Hsp90 inhibitors in tauopathies: in vivo pre-clinical development

$100,000
Adam Boxer, MD PhD
University of California San Francisco
A Pilot Clinical Trial of NAP (AL-108) for Corticobasaldegeneration and
Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration with Predicted Corticobasal Degeneration Pathology

$100,000
Virginia M.-Y. Lee, PhD
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Frontotemporal Lobar Degeneration (FTLD) Biomarker Assays

For more information on any of these 2009 projects click here.:


Recipients of the 2008 funding cycle are as follows:

$100,000
David Vocadlo, PhD
Assistant Professor of Chemistry
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada
Optimization of pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties of a small molecule o-glycosylation inhibitor for treatment of frontotemporal dementia

$ 65,000
Ben Bahr, PhD
Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Connecticut
In vitro testing of new lysosomal modulatory drugs for reducing tau aggregates in a hippocampal slice model

$ 50,000
Larry Baum, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Therapeutics
Chinese University, Hong Kong
Testing 17-AAG for treating frontotemporal dementia

$ 85,000
Tara Spires-Jones, PhD
Instructor of Neuroscience
Harvard Medical School
Sirtuins as modifiers of neurodegeneration is a mouse model of frontotemporal dementia

For more information on any of these 2008 projects click here.