Giving with the Goal of Eradicating Alzheimer’s
Grassroots fundraising efforts create momentum at the Rutgers Krieger Klein Alzheimer’s Research Center, where researchers seek to end the disease and the pain it causes patients and their families.
“Heartbreaking.”
When Nina Amello talks about her mother, Rosalia Dattolo, she uses that word frequently to describe the experience of watching the vibrant woman she loved descend into dementia.
She remembers when her mother began to repeat herself. Everyone in the family considered it a benign symptom of normal aging.
She remembers when her mother called to say the washing machine was broken, because she’d forgotten how to do laundry.
She recalls the look of fear and confusion in her mother’s eyes as Alzheimer’s disease thrust her into a world she could no longer navigate.
“It broke my heart that I couldn’t do more for her than help her with things like meals and getting dressed,” Amello says.
That sense of heartbreak and helplessness is undoubtedly familiar to anyone touched by Alzheimer’s—a number that’s almost impossible to calculate. Worldwide, 55 million people suffer from the disease—7 million in the U.S. and 185,000 in New Jersey. If a cure is not found, these numbers are expected to triple by 2050.
Amello channeled her own sense of helplessness into charity walks, hoping her steps might push research forward. But as her mother’s disease progressed, she wanted to do more. Her husband, Patrick—who as a child watched a beloved grandfather die of Alzheimer’s—shared her frustration. So in 2018, the couple, who live in Towaco, New Jersey, and own a wholesale bakery in Rockaway, established Remember Me, Inc., a foundation to support research to eradicate the disease.
“We have been so fortunate to receive tremendous support from family and friends,” Amello says. “We are truly grateful.”
Much of the money they’ve raised—largely through an annual gala and through online donations—has been given to the Rutgers Brain Health Institute in Piscataway. Their most recent gifts help fund Alzheimer’s and dementia research at the Herbert and Jacqueline Krieger Klein Alzheimer’s Research Center, which opened within the Brain Health Institute in fall 2023.
A Common Mission: End Alzheimer’s
The center and the Amellos share a determination to focus on relieving, and ultimately eliminating, suffering caused by the disease.
“We’re completely patient-oriented,” says Michal Schnaider Beeri, the center’s founding director who is a professor of neurology at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. “All our research is engaged in helping people at high risk for dementia, people developing dementia, or people who are sick. Our interest is in serving the community.”
To that end, the center is recruiting two large cohorts to study to see if they develop the disease and if so, why. One group, SAMENA, includes middle-aged individuals from South Asian, Middle Eastern, North African, and other backgrounds who are at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias due to diabetes, hypertension, obesity, or a parental family history of Alzheimer’s disease. This cohort is chosen in part because of their genetic diversity and because the group has, Schnaider Beeri says, “barely been investigated in the Alzheimer’s field—and ‘barely’ is an understatement.”
Each culture within those regions has a unique risk profile, Schnaider Beeri says. For instance, Indians have the world’s highest prevalence of diabetes—which tends to be severe, doubling or tripling their risk for Alzheimer’s.
The other cohort, BRAINY-NJ—Brazilian Aging in New York-New Jersey—is made up of older adults from the Brazilian immigrant community.
Researchers from multiple fields will look into a broad spectrum of factors in each cohort that may play a role in developing Alzheimer’s disease, including cognition, sleep, physical activity, social activity, pollution exposure, motor function, genetics, biomarkers, and brain structure, and function.
What makes this research groundbreaking is that the vast majority of human subjects of Alzheimer’s research have been white, which has led to results and treatments that may not apply to or work in every patient. The center is dedicated to studying under-researched groups and approaches to the disease, particularly if those approaches, Schnaider Beeri says, “have a high likelihood of becoming new therapies.”
Revolutionary Research
The Amellos’ generous gifts support the Alzheimer’s center’s pilot projects, which include groundbreaking research conducted by Max Tischfield, an assistant professor in the Rutgers Department of Cell Biology and Neuroscience. While much research focuses on beta amyloid, a protein fragment long implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s, Tischfield’s work investigates a different mechanism that may underlie Alzheimer’s disease: the brain’s cerebro-lymphatic system, which was discovered only a decade ago.
This network of lymphatic vessels residing in tissue surrounding the brain helps drain waste and cerebrospinal fluid, which contains deposits of beta amyloid, known as plaques, a possible culprit in Alzheimer’s. Tischfield’s research suggests that, as some people age, they lose the cerebrospinal fluid that flows through the brain’s lymphatic vessels and thus lose the ability to clear the brain of the waste that may cause Alzheimer’s.
“What we are asking,” Tischfield says, “is if we can rejuvenate the system by using drugs that target receptors on affected vessels.”
A drug used so far only in mice appears to do just that, and National Institutes of Health scientists enlisted to review Tischfield’s research praised his work as highly innovative and having a high likelihood of resulting in new therapies.
Tischfield is among researchers the Alzheimer’s center hopes to cultivate through various means, including a mentorship program, pilot grants, and annual prizes for their work. To foster collaboration, it will host a series of talks, forums, and symposia. Rutgers scientists in the Alzheimer’s community have already begun collaborating, and the center will also recruit researchers from academic institutions and industries across the U.S. and internationally.
Despite their diverse backgrounds, the common mission of the researchers, Schnaider Beeri says, is “to find strategies to support the preservation of healthy brain function and cognitive aging, as well as identifying methods to delay and prevent the onset of dementia.”
Research has been funded largely by philanthropy and NIH grants. The center was launched with a gift of more than $5 million from the late Congressman and Rutgers alumnus Herbert Klein in memory of his wife, Jacqueline Krieger Klein, who died in 2017 after a battle with Alzheimer’s.
Schnaider Beeri meets often with the Amellos and other donors to discuss how their gifts are being used and give updates on plans for the center’s future—plans that can be distilled into Schnaider Beeri’s most fervent hope.
“It is my dream that one day we’ll all have to choose another disease to study, because we will have resolved Alzheimer’s disease,” Schnaider Beeri says.
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