By: Kathy Hubbard
“My dad was a giant in every sense of the word,” Bill Gates wrote on his gatesnotes.com website on June 17, 2025. “More than anyone else, he shaped the values of the Gates Foundation, and everything we have accomplished is a testament to his vision of a better world. Sadly, we lost my dad five years ago to Alzheimer’s disease. It was a brutal experience, watching my brilliant, loving father go downhill and disappear.”
There are currently seven million Americans living with Alzheimer’s. That means one out of every nine people over age 65 have it. As we all live longer, those numbers will go up. Fortunately, thanks to the Gates Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Foundation and many other philanthropic and scientific research organizations, progress is being made toward earlier diagnosis and better medications. And who knows, in the future, even a cure might be found.
Gates said that he saw reasons for optimism during a trip he took in 2024 to Indiana University’s School of Medicine in Indianapolis. There, he said, he met with a team who has been doing “lots of leading-edge neuroscience.”
He said, “During my visit, I learned more about the latest big breakthrough in Alzheimer’s R&D: blood-based diagnostic tests. A number of different companies have approaches in the pipeline, but each of them works in roughly the same way by detecting the ratio of amyloid plaques in the brain. I’m optimistic that these tests will be a gamechanger.”
The announcement the Food and Drug Administration made on May 16 of this year just might be that game changer. That’s when they revealed that they had cleared the first blood test to be used in diagnosing Alzheimer’s Disease.
“The Lumipulse G pTau217/ß-Amyloid 1-42 Plasma Ratios is for the early detection of amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease in adult patients, aged 55 years and older, exhibiting signs and symptoms of the disease,” the announcement read.
“Alzheimer’s disease impacts too many people, more than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined,” said FDA Commissioner Martin A. Makary, M.D., M.P.H. “Knowing that 10 percent of people aged 65 and older have Alzheimer’s, and that by 2050 that number is expected to double, I am hopeful that new medical products such as this one will help patients.”
The new test identifies a sticky brain plaque, known as beta-amyloid, that is a key marker for Alzheimer’s. Prior to this test, the only FDA-approved methods for detecting amyloid were invasive tests of spinal fluid or expensive PET scans. Neither of which would have been ordered unless the patient showed clear signs of decline.
“Catching Alzheimer’s early is key,” Gates said. “We now know that the disease begins 15 to 20 years before you start to see signs. A simple, accurate, and easy-to-run blood test might one day make routine screening possible, identifying patients long before they experience cognitive decline.”
An Associated Press article written to announce the FDA’s decision regarding the tests explained that the lower cost and convenience of a blood test might help expand the use of some of the new drugs that have shown to “slightly slow the progression of Alzheimer’s by clearing amyloid from the brain.”
The FDA does warn that the possibility of a false-positive result may lead to an inappropriate diagnosis or that a delay in treatment might be the result of a false-negative outcome. These are the risks of this type of test unless used in conjunction with more traditional tests.
Gates said that there is a “huge amount of work to be done. This includes studying more about the disease’s pathology and continuing to work on better diagnostics.
“But I’m blown away by how much we have learned about Alzheimer’s over the last couple of years. When we lost my dad, an Alzheimer’s diagnosis was a death sentence. Just five years later, that is finally starting to change. I cannot help but be filled with a sense of hope when I think of all the progress being made on Alzheimer’s, even with so many challenges happening around the world. We are closer than ever before to a world where no one has to watch someone they love suffer from this awful disease,” he said.
Kathy Hubbard is a member of the Bonner General Health Foundation Advisory Council. She can be reached at [email protected]. This article was written for publication in the Bonner County Daily Bee on November 5, 2025.
