History
In 2012, three friends, a scientist, a lawyer and a philanthropist, each touched personally or professionally by Alzheimer’s disease (AD), met to discuss challenges in AD research: difficulty securing funding, lack of collaboration across different fields of research, the time it takes to develop research ideas, and little support for early-career researches or those with more novel or experimental ideas.
Their solution was the Charleston Conference on Alzhemer’s Disease (CCAD), a forum for early-career scientists to present their research proposals for review and possible funding. The three goals of the conference – to support early-career investigators, encourage risk and innovative thinking, and foster cross-field collaboration – established a new approach AD research. The first conference was held in March, 2013, in Charleston, South Carolina.
Since its inception, CCAD has established itself as a new and effective approach to funding scientific research, and promoting innovation and collaboration to better address AD. The goal of New Vision Research, the parent company of CCAD, is to replicate the CCAD model for scientific research in other diseases. In addition to CCAD, New Vision Research awards significant funding to truly promising investigators through the New Vision Scholar Award.
