Dementia Discovery Fund Collaborates with Immuneering to Discover New Alzheimer’s Therapies

The Dementia Discovery Fund (DDF) and Immuneering have formed a partnership to identify new therapy targets and candidates for Alzheimer’s disease.

DDF will invest $1.3 million to use Immuneering’s proprietary computational drug discovery platform and analyze available public data of Alzheimer’s disease patients.

Immuneering researchers use those methods along with drug discovery platforms that allow them to quickly conduct millions of chemical, genetic, or pharmacological tests.

These high-throughput processes can rapidly identify active compounds, antibodies, or genes that influence a particular molecular pathway, and provide starting points for drug design.

This strategy hopefully will help find new medicines or treatments for the disease.

“Together with the DDF, we aim to help further the scientific understanding of Alzheimer’s disease and identify disease-modifying medications by combining patient data with our drug discovery platform,” Ben Zeskind, CEO of Immuneering, said in a press release.

Since its launch in 2015, the DDF has built a portfolio of investments in drug discovery initiatives in the United Kingdom and United States in diverse areas of research. The venture capital fund believes there are significant opportunities to apply insights gained in diverse areas, such as oncology and immunology, in the development of new drugs for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.

“The successful discovery of new treatments for dementia will require new approaches that are both systematic and different to what has been attempted to date. This collaboration brings together Immuneering’s unique drug discovery platform with DDF’s novel approach to identifying and investing in novel science to create meaningful new medicines for dementia. We believe this collaboration holds great promise for providing new insights that will lead to new targets and, ultimately, new medicines for people with Alzheimer’s,” added Tetsu Maruyama, chief scientific officer of DDF.

In May 2017 DDF also invested $5 million into Cerevance, a start-up company developing new approaches to treat dementia patients.