Sterling Johnson says that the world may be just a few years away from a major breakthrough that could do for Alzheimer’s disease what HIV treatments did for AIDS: make the disease far less threatening.
“In the last five years we’ve had some amazing breakthroughs with therapies,” he says. “More recently, with NIH funding, investigators have shown that if you give these kinds of therapies early enough, we can indeed delay symptom onset.”
However, the caveat “with NIH funding” has recently become more tenuous. In February 2025, at the behest of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced a new policy that would cap spending in research grants.
Johnson is a neuropsychologist and the Jean R. Finley Professor of Geriatrics and Dementia, and since 2002, he’s been one of the UW’s leading Alzheimer’s researchers. On the April 2025 episode of the UW Now Live, he will join with Mike Knetter and UW faculty members Anjon Audhya and Dorata Grejner-Brzezinska to discuss how the threatened cap could affect research in general and UW Alzheimer’s research in particular.
My Main Area of Research Is:
I lead the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention or WRAP, and it’s through that study where we’ve been collecting samples of blood [from thousands of Alzheimer’s patients and their family members] and keeping them in the freezer for two decades. Now we’re able to apply new technologies to our sample set, and we have found that we can see at a person level when this disease begins.
More recently I’ve been involved in the National MIDUS [Midlife in the United States] Study — we’re bringing the biomarker technology that we have here to that study. And I’ve been involved with and am the associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. We’ve developed a national study that involves all of the [Alzheimer’s disease centers in the United States], and it’s going to take what we've learned from WRAP and bring it nationwide.
Tonight on the UW Now Live, I’ll discuss:
I want our audience to know that incredible advances have happened in Alzheimer’s disease research. Most of us know somebody with Alzheimer’s or some other form of dementia, and it’s very common as we age. To prevent Alzheimer’s disease, you have to first detect it, and you have to detect it confidently with some degree of prediction of who will go on to get symptoms. We here at UW have learned — through NIH funding — that Alzheimer’s disease begins 20 years before symptoms begin.
If There’s One Thing Viewers Should Know, It’s:
This is an extraordinary leap forward — now we can anchor decisions about therapy to when the disease began rather than who has symptoms. Symptoms don’t begin for 20 years after the disease onset. What we’ve been able to do here is give the whole field confidence in how we diagnose and detect this disease. We’re at that point thanks to research done here at the UW.
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