Dear Friends:

With the holidays approaching and the conclusion of 3 years of progress at Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, we are grateful for your support and excited about the challenges ahead.

The Progress. We are funding 17 research projects in 8 different outstanding research institutions across the nation. 

Charlie Glabe’s article on oligomers in this Quarterly Report is just one of many excellent illustrations of the high quality, breakthrough collaborations we are supporting.

The Alzheimer’s Genome Project is on Target. Our core effort, the Alzheimer’s Genome Project, is yielding exciting results and is on target for the identification of all the genes affecting risk for Alzheimer’s disease by the summer of 2008. This means that for the first time researchers all over the world will have identified for them all of the basic genetic “players” which contribute to Alzheimer’s disease. The next steps are, first, to learn how these players make their deadly contributions and, second, how to keep them from doing what they are doing (the cures).

The challenge. In order to address the above critical issues, we will need to fund many more projects than we have in our short history.  We will fund some of these projects directly, and some we will fund in conjunction with other institutions. Other projects may be undertaken by other research centers without our direct financial support since we will make our breakthrough findings available to all.

What this means is that as our Alzheimer’s Genome Project initiative provides our Research Consortium and others with abundant new leads, researchers will be in an excellent position to take the next steps in developing a cure for Alzheimer’s if we can provide them with sufficient new funds to continue their breakthrough research.

We are proud that the number of our donors has doubled over the last 12 months and as of December 1, 2007 our fundraising total is over $7.5 million.  We are extremely grateful for the generosity and spirit of our donors.

For our part, we as founders reiterate our pledge to continue to provide substantial, personal financial support of this effort.  We remind our contributors that the founding families, in addition to funding research, also pay all operating costs of the foundation so that all donations received go 100% into Alzheimer’s research.  Please join us for the next critical steps along the path to ridding society of this dreaded disease.

Sincerely yours,

Henry McCance
Jeffrey Morby
Phyllis Rappaport