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Battle for the Brain
Research Director William Thies ’65 hopes to find a cure for Alzheimer’s before the disease finds Baby Boomers. 

By Tom Nugent 

Competition for funding Alzheimer's research is fierce, and William Thies's job is to decide who gets financial support. Last year, Thies and his staff selected 96 research projects for funding from nearly 650 applicants. (Photo by Eileen Ryan)

He sits beneath a giant wall poster that features a detailed photograph of a healthy human brain. For William H. Thies ’65, that huge photo is the map of a battleground.
 
His passionate quest: To find a way — as the national director of a $200-million U.S. health research program — to prevent a looming and potentially “catastrophic” epidemic in brain-destroying Alzheimer’s disease.
 
Ask Thies to assess the fast-growing threat and this former biology major won’t pull his punches. “More than five million Americans are affected by the disease right now, and that number could easily quadruple within the next few decades,” warns the vice president for medical and scientific relations at the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association (AA). “If you do the arithmetic, it’s pretty alarming.
 
“We’ve got 78 million baby boomers out there, and they’re now hitting retirement age. As they get older, the number of Alzheimer’s patients will increase by a factor of four. That’s 20 million people with the disease by 2050.
     
“Right now, Alzheimer’s costs the nation $100 billion a year. Multiply by four, and you’ve got a yearly price tag of $400 billion. I worry that Alzheimer’s could end up bankrupting the entire U.S. health care system, if we don’t slow it down.”
     
For Thies, a silver-haired Chicagoan who grew up “just down Waukegan Road” in Glenview, the approaching surge in Alzheimer’s represents nothing less than “a potential public health disaster for all of us.”
     
Increasingly alarmed by the threat, the veteran pharmacologist-turned-administrator has spent the past nine years working on the problem. As the top administrative officer for the research-education arm of the nation’s largest Alzheimer’s nonprofit, Thies decides which research projects most deserve funding. Since its creation in 1980, his association has handed out more than $200 million to battle the ailment, which typically destroys the memory and cognitive functioning of patients before finally killing them. 
     
This is a really exciting time to be in Alzheimer’s research, Thies says. Later this year, for example, the first-ever compound [a new drug called Alzhemed] designed to slow the disease at the beginning will undergo final testing. Promising initiatives may soon produce much better “neural imaging” systems, which are high-tech methods of diagnosing Alzheimer’s and may be able to detect the disease much earlier. This advance could eventually prevent the onset of the final dementia stage. “Our hope is that we’ll see a major breakthrough soon,” he says.
 
Drop by Thies’s office, and you’ll probably find him knee-deep in piles of brain studies and research proposals — all of which are looking for the magic bullet that could stop Alzheimer’s. Although he gets some help from scientific panels, the funding buck stops right beneath that giant photo of the human brain, where Thies and his dozen staffers sort through stacks of competing grant applications daily.
 
Last year, AA awarded a record $21 million in research grants, making it by far the nation’s largest private, nonprofit Alzheimer’s organization. Although there are numerous regional support groups and family foundations scattered around the country, their total dollar contributions to research typically amount to less than one-third of the funds awarded by Thies’s team each year.
 
Armed with a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Pittsburgh and 10 years of experience in running a similar health research program for the American Heart Association (AHA), Thies “started learning about intellectual rigor and scientific precision back as a freshman biology student at Lake Forest, where I got a rude awakening.”
 
The middle-class son of a painting contractor, Thies admits he was an “uninspired student who spent lots of time on things he was interested in, and not much time on required courses.” His loosey-goosey attitude got him into trouble with Chemistry Professor William B. Martin, who reviewed a sloppy assignment and told Thies:“If you were working for me and handed this in, I’d fire you!”
 
Says Thies today: “That was a real wakeup call for me, andI think that message was probably more important than the chemistry course!”
 
With the lesson in hand, Thies went on to help build the organization that became today’s American Stroke Association(it began as a unit of the AHA, under his direction), before taking his present job. At 64, the Lake Forest resident is still at the top of his game — and he says he won’t retire until the Alzheimer’s battle is won.
 
That won’t be easy, however. “Unfortunately, the federal government has chosen the worst possible time to reduce funding of Alzheimer’s projects,” he says. “That doesn’t directly affect the dollars we’re able to hand out to researchers, because all of the monies we raise come from private, non-government sources. Nonetheless, the decline in federal monies for Alzheimer’s has a chilling effect throughout the entire field.”
 
He cites a $150 million drop-off from $670 million annually in real research dollars from the federal government during the last few years. “I think that’s really short-sighted,” Thies says. “Alzheimer’s is a critical public health issue for this nation today — and I have no intention of quitting until we get it under control.”

Tom Nugent is a freelance writer based in Hastings, Michigan.