Dementia Frontiers Fund

Dementia Frontiers Fund — Main grant awards

Supports flagship dementia teams with major follow-on grant opportunities to strengthen real-world implementation.

The Dementia Frontiers Fund main grant awards represent the substantive funding stage of a flagship initiative co-led by Alzheimer's Research UK and Gates Ventures to pursue paradigm-shifting dementia science. At least £6 million in total is committed across approximately four to five interdisciplinary teams, each receiving funding for a two-year research programme. The awards target three defined scientific questions: prediction and staging of disease progression, the contribution of distinct brain pathology types, and resilience mechanisms in populations at high genetic or lifestyle risk of dementia.

Main grant award decisions are expected from November 2026 onwards, drawing exclusively from teams that completed the seed funding stage between March and June 2026. There is no separate open application path to the main grant: eligibility flows through the seed stage, which in turn drew from the October 2025 expression-of-interest window. For-profit organisations, universities, nonprofits, and research institutes are all eligible team members. Individual applications are not accepted. At least one funded team will receive additional follow-on funding for a minimum of three years beyond the initial two-year award period.

This is a high-stakes, long-horizon programme rather than a conventional project grant. Teams are expected to require significant coordinated investment across disciplines — spanning clinical cohorts, computational approaches, and experimental neuroscience — at a scale that exceeds what any single institution or discipline could deliver alone. Organisations wishing to compete in a future cycle should engage early with ARUK's research partnerships team, build genuinely cross-disciplinary consortia, and track publication of the next expression-of-interest timeline on the ARUK and Gates Ventures programme pages.