The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is awarding $7 million to five teams of Alzheimer's disease researchers over the next three years.

Alzheimer’s disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, impacting an estimated 5.3 million Americans. Currently, someone develops Alzheimer’s every 67 seconds, with that number projected to grow to every 33 seconds by 2050 according to the Alzheimer’s Association Facts and Figures report. Despite widespread research into treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, there is a staggering 99.6 percent failure rate in clinical trials to bring new treatments to market.

“We cannot hope to fight Alzheimer’s until we understand the basic biology that underlies the onset and progression of disease,” says Tom Skalak, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation's executive director for science and technology. “The Allen Distinguished Investigator projects will provide crucial fresh direction in Alzheimer’s disease research, in part because they include team member perspectives both from within and outside the Alzheimer’s field. We know that these kinds of creative, cutting-edge projects will produce new diagnostics, treatments or even cures for this devastating disease.”

Through these grants, the foundation seeks to open new frontiers in science by supporting early-stage research that incorporates novel, creative and ambitious approaches with the potential to reinvent entire fields. The call for proposals in Alzheimer’s research focused on generating insight into the basic biological foundations of Alzheimer’s, with an emphasis on cell biology, and called for multidisciplinary teams that included researchers with a background in Alzheimer’s paired with scientists who bring fresh perspectives from outside the field.

The Puget Sound Business Journal reports: For Allen, it's a personal issue. In the past, he has told KING5 that his mother suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and that's partly where his interest in finding treatments stems from.