Dementia Frontiers Fund — Seed funding stage
Funds interdisciplinary seed teams shaping dementia proposals for larger follow-on awards.
The Dementia Frontiers Fund is a flagship multi-year initiative co-led by Alzheimer's Research UK and Gates Ventures, designed to fund paradigm-shifting approaches to three specific unresolved dementia challenges: predicting and staging disease progression, understanding the contribution of different brain pathologies, and identifying resilience mechanisms in high-risk populations. The seed funding stage, running from March to June 2026, provides approximately £50,000 per team to roughly ten interdisciplinary groups to develop full main-grant proposals. Teams at this stage were selected from an expression-of-interest window held in October 2025 and are not recruited through a separate open call.
Seed awards support proposal development costs — workshops, feasibility experiments, team coordination — rather than full research delivery. Teams must be genuinely multidisciplinary; solo principal investigators and single-discipline groups do not meet the fund's eligibility intent. Organisations from the for-profit sector, universities, nonprofits, and research institutes are all eligible to participate as members of a qualifying team. The fund explicitly requires projects that demand significant investment and coordination beyond what any individual research team could independently achieve.
Main grant award decisions are expected from November 2026 onwards, committing at least £6 million in total across approximately four to five teams for two-year research programmes. At least one funded team will receive follow-on funding for a minimum of three additional years. Teams preparing for a future Dementia Frontiers Fund cycle should monitor ARUK and Gates Ventures communications for the next expression-of-interest window, and should build interdisciplinary coalitions — spanning neuroscience, clinical research, data science, and computational biology — well in advance of any EOI opening.
Three paradigm-shift dementia questions: disease progression prediction/staging, contribution of different brain changes, and resilience in high-risk populations.
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