New Prize Offers $2 Million for Finding Key to Alzheimer's in Past Research

James Truchard, the now-retired CEO of National Instruments, has announced up to $2 million in prizes for researchers who can find the mechanism that causes Alzheimer's by poring through the more than 100,000 scientific papers published on the disease, reports Stat . Truchard said the many factors thought to contribute to Alzheimer's reported in the scientific literature have yet to be synthesized into a "grand unified theory" that might lead to a treatment or cure. "I'm hoping there's some genius out there who will put them together," he noted. The University of Texas at San Antonio College of Sciences will administer the Oskar Fischer Prizes, and it remains uncertain as to what the criteria will be for winning either the $2 million top prize or two second-place prizes of $500,000 each and four third-place prizes of $250,000. "It does seem a bit risky in achieving the goal of finding a theory that completely explains the disease, but the actual weaving of the literature into a theory shouldn't be that hard," suggests Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation Executive Director Howard Fillit.