ATLANTA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–In 2011, the National
Institute of Health spent more than $6 billion on cancer research, compared to
less than $480 million on Alzheimers disease research. Those numbers do not
seem alarming until you learn there are over 5.4 million people in the United
States coping with the debilitating disease, a number that is expected to
balloon as the baby boomer generation continues to age.
Since the only FDA approved medications on the market merely
slow the progression of the disease, the only way to combat these astonishing
figures is to fund research geared at halting the progression and eventually
reversing the atrophy in the brain completely.
In 2012, the NeuroScience Foundation is committed to
fighting this issue with a physician training program. Gwinnett Technical
College is pursuing a
grant to fund the development of an eventual Clinical Principal Investigators
(CPI) certificate program. The program would potentially train local physicians
as CPIs, a role crucial in the development and advancement of drugs, therapies
and medical devices. Once trained, these physicians will be able to forge a new
paradigm and increase the speed and efficiency at which clinical research is
conducted.
If you would like more information on the physicians
training program or are interested in making a donation to the NeuroScience
Foundation to support Alzheimers disease research here in the Atlanta area, please call (404) 508-1094 or
visit www.nsfoundation.net.
Posted by Sean Fenske, Editor-in-Chief, MDT