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This is Adrian Ivinson at The
Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center.
And I'm going to be discussing
whether there's a role
for academia in drug discovery.
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But before I start talking
about the role for academia
in drug discovery, let's
quickly review the problems
that we're facing, the
challenge that collectively we
need to address.
What I'm showing here is
a simple graph showing
the part of the US population.
We can see on the vertical
axis, the numbers in millions.
And on the horizontal
axis we can see the year.
Now, if we follow
the blue line, we can
see that back in 1940 there
were only about 10 million
Americans over the age of 65.
But over the next 60, 70 years,
that number gradually rose.
It's a fairly steady
increase up until 2010
when they were just under 40 million
Americans over the age of 65.
But this is the interesting point is
that today, 2012, we're actually at
the inflection point of this curve.
We're seeing a sharp rise
in the number of Americans
exceeding that age such
that over the next 30 years
we're going to more than
double the number of Americans
over the age of 65.
And the lower the line shows
a similar sort of pattern
for those over the age of 85.
Now, the reason I'm pointing
out this increase in the number
of Americans over the age of
65 is that unfortunately
we know that 10% of
that age group suffer
from a neurodegenerative disease.
There are diseases like
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS,
multiple sclerosis,
and quite a long list
of other rare
neurodegenerative diseases.
So if we're looking at
an aging population where
the number of Americans
over the age of 65
is going to double over
the next few decades,
then we know that the
number of Americans
suffering from neurodegenerative
diseases is also going to double.
And that's a very
significant challenge for us.
