20 Feb 2006

The MetLife Foundation announced this year’s award winners at a celebration of its 20 years of funding innovative Alzheimer disease research. Karen Ashe, of the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, won the 2006 MetLife Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer Disease for her work on mouse models of AD. Frank LaFerla, of the University of California, Irvine, won a Promising Work Award for his triple-transgenic model, as did Christian Haass, of Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany, for his studies of the cell biology and mechanism of action of γ-secretase.

The MetLife Foundation marked this anniversary of its AD funding program with a brief conference that brought together 26 previous award recipients with leaders in aging research, government, business, and philanthropy last Wednesday in Washington, DC. Speakers emphasized the need to raise awareness of the looming public health implication of AD across society at large and in government in particular. In addition, they stressed the importance of early detection, the value of lifestyle changes for prevention, and the need to attract young researchers to the cause. Readers can listen to the audio of the research briefing at http://www.videonewswire.com/event.asp?id=32099. For more details, see GEN news story or visit MetLife.—Gabrielle Strobel.