‘LifeArc is joining with Our Future Health to solve the puzzle of hard-to-treat diseases’
If you have a loved one who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, you may recently have noticed headlines about a new drug, lecanemab. In trials, it shows promising signs of helping to slow the disease in its early stages.
Lecanemab came out of a collaboration which included the charity LifeArc. LifeArc played a key role in the discovery of the antibody/molecule that lies at the heart of this treatment. And LifeArc is now Our Future Health’s latest charity funding partner. It has taken seat on one of our boards, alongside the other charities, government bodies and industry partners that co-fund our programme.
LifeArc isn’t a typical charity. For one, it doesn’t ask the public for money. It funds itself by developing new ways of diagnosing conditions earlier, as well as treatments – such as lecanemab. “We fund and support research into new medical technologies, taking research from the lab bench to patients’ bedsides,” says Dr Dave Powell, Chief Scientific Officer of LifeArc. “Our motto is: ‘Making life science life changing’.”
LifeArc also differs from other charities because it works in five health areas. “We focus on five areas of ‘high unmet need’,” says Dave. “These are areas of research that have not had a lot of attention or money or were seen as too complex or difficult to solve.” The five are:
1) Motor Neuron Disease (MND) and neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s disease
2) Global health, including antimicrobial resistance, neglected tropical diseases and emerging viral threats
3) Chronic respiratory infections
4) Childhood cancer
5) Rare disease
The charity uses its expertise in science, funding and translational research to work with best-in-class experts from a range of different fields, harnessing their knowledge to find solutions. “We join with organisations – academic institutions, other charities, patients and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies – to help us know more,” says Dave.
For that reason, a partnership with the UK’s largest health research programme felt like a natural step for the charity to take.
Putting the puzzle of each disease together
“Our Future Health will be a platform for progress in our five areas,” says Dave. “Biology is fascinating. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. When you look at a disease like Alzheimer’s, you start out not knowing everything about it. You can see different parts of the puzzle, but not the whole picture.
“Our collaboration with Our Future Health will give us more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, so we can understand the whole picture of diseases like Alzheimer’s better.”
Dave says that, as a scientist, he’s hugely excited by the size of our programme. “There can be value in the clinical data of a single individual but, in a scientific study, an N=1 is a small number and generally such studies require large numbers of participants. With Our Future Health, we’re going to reach N=5 million. That is an incredibly powerful set of data indeed.
“And now there is complex machine learning that can analyse these vast amounts of data in ways that were not possible before.”
The pieces of the Alzheimer’s puzzle
“Another reason Our Future Health is so powerful is that for each volunteer, there will be lots of different kinds of data,” says Dave. He points to the fact that our volunteers share physical measurements, insights about their lifestyle, and genetic information. “These are the parts of the jigsaw puzzle that help you put together the total picture of a condition.”
The picture gets more detailed with every passing year, too. Volunteers share their health records, which means researchers can see when disease symptoms might start. Researchers can also apply to do further studies with the volunteers, to learn more about specific areas.
Dave returns to the example of Alzheimer’s. “There’s a lot of work going on to try to understand how people’s cognitive function changes as we age,” Dave says. “The point of this is to identify or predict the disease as early as possible, even before people have obvious symptoms.”
Currently, researchers are looking for biomarkers in the blood that indicate Alzheimer’s is developing – or will develop. They’re also working on digital apps that measure changes in someone’s brain function over time.
“An app could be along the lines of Wordle – which I do every day,” says Dave. “Maybe one day, my Wordle app – or something like it – might report changes in my cognitive function. It might say: ‘Three years ago, Dave completed Wordle in five minutes. Now it’s taking him ten minutes”
Our Future Health could provide a pool of people to trial these kinds of predictive tests – and promising new drugs too. “I’ve been in the industry for nearly 30 years and drug development takes a really long time, maybe ten to 15 years to develop a new drug,” says Dave. “But thanks to Our Future Health and the millions of volunteers out there, we can make data-based discoveries that can be impact people’s lives much more quickly.
“When you volunteer for Our Future Health, you add to the power of the N=5 million data that is going to build on our knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions, puzzle piece by puzzle piece.”
‘Volunteering is a chance to help everyone’
Dave reveals that he’s already volunteered for Our Future Health. “I see Our Future Health as a partnership of volunteers like me and you, alongside charities including LifeArc, the NHS, government and industry. This collaboration can revolutionise the way we fight diseases.
“I’d like to tell everyone to volunteer, and I’m glad I did it myself. If the knowledge we gain can help me later in life, that’s great. But if it’s our children who benefit, I’m happy with that too.”
Read more about our partnerships.
Let’s prevent disease together
By volunteering for Our Future Health, you can help health researchers discover new ways to prevent, detect and treat common conditions such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s.