MIND Prize Bets $6M on Maverick Science to Beat Brain Disease

NEW YORK, NY – March 10, 2026 – By Tyler Nguyen

The Pershing Square Foundation has placed a multi-million-dollar bet on a new strategy to combat one of medicine's most formidable challenges: neurodegenerative disease. The foundation today announced the eight inaugural winners of its “MIND” Prize, committing a total of $6 million to a cohort of pioneering researchers pursuing unconventional, high-risk ideas that could revolutionize our understanding of Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia.

Each of the eight scientists will receive $750,000 over three years to fund projects that veer away from well-trodden paths, embracing approaches that range from repurposing cancer therapies to making skulls temporarily transparent. The initiative, whose name stands for Maximizing Innovation in Neuroscience Discovery, is a deliberate effort to catalyze breakthroughs by funding the kind of bold, early-stage science that often struggles to secure support from larger, more conservative funding bodies.

“Thanks to advanced technologies and human creativity, Alzheimer’s Disease and her siblings are finally being considered remediable disorders of the human condition,” said Pershing Square Foundation Trustee, Neri Oxman, PhD. “This year’s cohort reflects the promise of technological and biological research serendipity, tying molecular structures with behavioral patterns and genetic predispositions with the power of AI.”

A New Paradigm for Neuroscience

The MIND Prize enters a research landscape dominated by massive government-led efforts. In the United States, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocates approximately $3.8 billion annually to Alzheimer's research. While essential, such large-scale funding often prioritizes projects with extensive preliminary data, sometimes inadvertently favoring incremental advances over potentially transformative leaps.

The Pershing Square Foundation’s $6 million investment is not meant to compete in scale but in strategy. It functions as a form of venture capital for science, targeting a critical gap by empowering brilliant minds to explore audacious hypotheses that might otherwise never be tested. It’s a targeted injection of capital designed to de-risk radical ideas and generate the foundational data needed to attract larger-scale support down the line.

This approach aims to directly address the foundation's goal to “change the paradigm of neuroscience research.” By fostering a community of “next-frontier thinkers,” the prize seeks to diversify the portfolio of ideas being pursued in the fight against a disease that affects millions worldwide and has thwarted countless conventional therapeutic strategies.

The Next-Frontier Thinkers

The eight winning projects exemplify a bold departure from the ordinary, tackling the complexity of neurodegeneration from entirely new angles.

Dr. Corina Amor Vegas of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is developing a CAR T cell therapy—a revolutionary approach primarily used in oncology—to target aging “zombie” cells outside the brain. Her work is based on the provocative idea that dysfunctional tissues in the periphery of the body contribute significantly to cognitive decline, shifting the focus from a purely brain-centric view of Alzheimer's.

At Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Marissa Scavuzzo is investigating the gut-brain axis by studying enteric glia, cells within the gut's own nervous system. Her project will even look to hibernating species to uncover natural mechanisms of resilience, hoping to find new therapies that target the gut to protect the brain.

Other projects are focused on creating revolutionary new ways to see the disease unfold. Dr. Guosong Hong at Stanford University is developing a method to make the scalp and skull of living mice temporarily transparent. This would allow for repeated, non-invasive imaging of the same deep-brain neurons over time, providing an unprecedented window into how neural circuits break down during memory loss.

Meanwhile, Dr. Maxim Prigozhin at Harvard University is creating a new imaging technology that will provide multicolor, 3D maps of amyloid and tau pathologies at nanometer resolution. This would allow scientists to see the precise location of these toxic proteins within intact synapses, a feat currently impossible.

The cohort also includes researchers tackling the problem through genetics, metabolism, and environmental factors. Dr. Ryan Corces at the Gladstone Institutes is using machine learning to find new genetic drivers of Alzheimer's in families who lack known mutations. Dr. Pascal Geldsetzer of Stanford University is leveraging large-scale data to investigate the compelling link between shingles vaccination and a reduced risk of dementia. And Dr. Daniel Hochbaum at Harvard Medical School is exploring whether restoring thyroid hormone signaling in the brain could be a new strategy to slow neurodegeneration.

A Confluence of Minds

Beyond the financial award, the MIND Prize is engineered to build an ecosystem of collaboration. The selection process was guided by a scientific advisory board that reads like a who's who of modern science, including Nobel laureates Richard Axel and Michael Young, CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, and engineering visionary Dean Kamen. The board's diverse expertise—spanning genetics, neurotechnology, stem cell biology, and clinical neurology—underscores the prize's central thesis: solving the puzzle of the brain requires a confluence of disciplines.

This emphasis on interdisciplinary work reflects a growing consensus that complex biological problems rarely yield to siloed approaches. Success stories from institutions like Yale and the Mayo Clinic have repeatedly shown that breakthroughs often happen at the intersection of fields, where neurologists collaborate with engineers, and data scientists work with molecular biologists.

The Pershing Square Foundation is betting that by empowering these eight researchers and fostering a collaborative community, the MIND Prize can serve as a powerful catalyst. The goal is not just to fund individual projects, but to spark a new, more dynamic, and more daring way of conducting neuroscience, accelerating the journey toward a future where dementia is no longer a devastating inevitability.