Alzheimer's Institute Mission

The Alzheimer's Institute is a self-supporting academic research institute within the Division of Academic Affairs at California State University Channel Islands.  Tax-deductible contributions may be made to the Alzheimer's Institute through the CSUCI Foundation.  Our mission is to enable new drug development through the identification of high quality novel drug leads that might become the Alzheimer’s disease medicines of the future.

There are currently 14 million Alzheimer’s disease sufferers worldwide. The geriatric demographic predicts the number of Alzheimer’s patients to increase to 45 million by the year 2050. The burden on society and the extent of human suffering is incalculable. Alzheimer’s disease will inevitably become the most devastating human health crisis of our time.

The Alzheimer’s Institute will utilize proprietary laboratory methods, including the chemical conditioning of natural plant extracts, to build an archived collection of novel leadlike and druglike molecules to be made available for biological testing by academic and industrial Alzheimer’s disease researchers. We will focus initially on ethnobotanical herbal remedies that have been used traditionally for the treatment of dementias, including Alzheimer's disease.

For example, Ginkgo Biloba is an ethnobotanical herbal remedy for dementia

We will also utilize our proprietary chemical conditioning method to create a high quality collection of novel druglike compounds from the most common natural materials. We will test these at the various Alzheimer’s disease-relevant biological assays to identify new drug leads. Our collection of conditioned extracts will also be tested in stem cell differentiation assays to identify chemical compounds that facilitate stem cell differentiation into nerve cells. These drug candidates would potentially be orally administered neuroregenerative agents. 

Structural population-based Alzheimer's patient brain images by UCLA Laboratory of Neuroimaging

In addition, the Channel Islands Alzheimer’s Institute will work to establish a sense of urgency for rapid communication and scientific data exchange among Alzheimer’s researchers in the drug discovery community worldwide. We will facilitate collaboration between groups who are normally insulated by the confidentiality culture characteristic of the pharmaceutical industry. We will create value by protecting new intellectual property in the form of composition-of-matter patent applications. The Alzheimer’s Institute will seek to out-license intellectual property to pharmaceutical industry partners so to accelerate the development of our new drug leads toward human trials for Alzheimer’s disease. We will aggressively communicate the structure-activity data we generate for the information of the greater Alzheimer’s disease research community.

With the Departments of Biology and Chemistry at California State University, the Alzheimer’s Institute intends to provide educational opportunities for the development of student scientists who will experience applied drug discovery research projects focused on a very worthy cause. With the help of our pharmaceutical industry partners we intend to enable and accelerate the development of drug candidates that might help to address the unmet medical need of millions of Alzheimer’s patients worldwide.