A global competition supported by Bill Gates and other partners has been launched, offering a $1 million prize to the team that develops the most innovative AI solution to accelerate breakthroughs in Alzheimer's and related dementias research. The "Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize" is organized by the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative) and calls for the use of agentic AI, which can behave autonomously by performing reasoning and decision-making. Applications opened on August 19, 2025.
The goal of the competition is to harness the power of AI to sift through the massive quantities of existing research data on Alzheimer's and related dementias to identify promising leads that might have been missed by researchers. Unlike traditional AI, agentic AI can independently plan, reason, and act – helping scientists analyze vast datasets, speed up drug discovery and biomarker identification, and improve trial design. The winning AI tool will be made publicly available through the AD Data Initiative's AD Workbench, a free, secure, cloud-based research environment that allows scientists worldwide to share, access, and analyze data across platforms.
Niranjan Bose, interim executive director of the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative and managing director for health and life sciences at Gates Ventures, emphasized the potential of AI to revolutionize the pace and scale of dementia research. He noted that this opportunity is critical, given the high number of lives at risk. Gregory Moore, senior advisor at both Gates Ventures and the AD Data Initiative, believes AI could facilitate a shift from reactive to predictive research, identifying novel biomarkers, optimizing clinical trial designs, and revealing opportunities for drug creation and repurposing.
Bill Gates announced the creation of the AD Data Initiative in November 2020, shortly after his father, Bill Gates Sr., passed away from Alzheimer's at the age of 94. The initiative represents a coalition of advocacy, government, industry, and philanthropic organizations working to support diagnostics, treatments, and cures for Alzheimer's and similar diseases. In a Father's Day post this year, Gates reflected on the disease, noting that over 7 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer's, which equates to 1 in 9 individuals over the age of 65. He also stated that these numbers will only increase as life expectancies continue to rise.
Alzheimer's is a particularly complex disease with multiple potential causes and a web of biological pathways that have long challenged researchers. It took more than a century of research before the Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug treatments and blood-based diagnostics targeting the disease. Agentic AI is well-suited to tackle these challenges because it can autonomously analyze large amounts of data and catch insights that human researchers might miss.
The competition is open to AI and machine learning engineers, computational biomedicine experts, tech companies, clinical specialists, and Alzheimer's researchers. A key requirement is that the solutions must be compatible with the AD Workbench platform. Semi-finalists will be announced in December, and finalists will compete next March at the Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease Conference in Copenhagen.
With Alzheimer's cases projected to reach 152 million by 2050, the prize aims to mobilize the global innovation community to harness AI for faster, more predictive research. The competition reflects a growing trend in Silicon Valley to develop AI models that can help diagnose medical problems, develop new drugs, and cure degenerative diseases and cancer.
