At a recent WIRED Health event, Alzheimer's researcher John Hardy laid out the challenges facing the field. Decades of research and billions in funding have produced few effective treatments for the disease. Hardy argued that the next breakthrough will require more than scientific discovery—it will need better coordination, more money, and smarter policy.
The reason this matters is straightforward: the traditional model of individual labs chasing individual discoveries hasn't delivered for patients. Hardy suggested the field needs to treat funding and coordination as seriously as it treats protein folding or amyloid hypotheses. Without that shift, another decade could pass with little to show.
It's a familiar argument in medical research, but it carries weight coming from someone who's spent decades in the trenches. Whether the money and coordination will materialize is another question—the field has historically struggled with both.