AI Explorations
Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize
We're backing visionary AI solutions to accelerate Alzheimer’s research with a $1M Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize. Our goal is to leverage agentic AI to help generate a powerful leap in the pace, scale, and reach of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias research. The application process closed in September 2025.
The winner will be announced the week of March 16, 2026.
The William Gates Sr. AD Fellowship Program
The William H. Gates Sr. Fellowship from the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative was established to support a new generation of researchers who have novel approaches to end Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Launched in 2023, this two-year program encourages and supports researchers from around the world to be bold, creative, and innovative. This may include generating new hypotheses about the biology of dementia or challenging existing ones; and using novel data analysis ideas or statistical approaches on de-identified human or human-derived data to accelerate new discoveries in ADRD.
Members of the inaugural (2023-2025) cohort have focused on a wide range of topics, including early detection and prediction models, age-based predispositions to AD, and new imaging-based prediction approaches.
Cohort II, to be announced the first half of 2025, will focus more specifically on accelerating progress in AD research through generative artificial intelligence and novel machine learning approaches.
Data Challenges
Data Challenges bring together cohorts of researchers around datasets hosted on AD Workbench. They are designed to generate interest in AD research and insights into priority questions, and to encourage nontraditional researchers and out-of-the-box thinkers to engage with these data.
Current and past challenges have engaged researchers to:
- Accelerate biomarker discovery in ADRD to generate insights that could improve detection, prognosis, and treatment pathways;
- Explore the Bio-Hermes dataset, which includes an array of multi-modal markers collected from 1,001 US-based participants, 24% of whom are from traditionally underrepresented communities; and
- Build an automated algorithm that classifies a patient’s phase of AD based on a common cognitive screening tool for dementia.
Scientific Driver Projects
We are working to initiate Driver Projects which focus on standing up targeted/dedicated, global, multi-disciplinary scientific consortia and teams to answer a number of priority research questions. By identifying relevant available datasets and/or existing datasets that need to be unlocked for researcher access, including unpublished data, we hope to aid researchers in improving early detection/diagnosis, stratifying risk factors, and designing better treatment and intervention strategies, including better clinical trial design.
Driver Project teams will have dedicated funding as well as technical advisory groups to guide their proposed efforts.
Global Research Collaborations and Consortia
We offer the AD Workbench environment and suite of tools and resources to several global research collaborations to conduct analyses of data that are not yet public.
For example, the Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium is analyzing the largest proteomics dataset ever assembled, consisting of over 300 million protein measurements. After an embargo period for consortium members to privately access the data, the harmonized v1 dataset is now publicly available to the wider research community through AD Workbench. GNPC is now facilitating two additional proteomics consortia: GNPC vMultiplatform, which extends GNPC v1 via additional cohorts and proteomic platforms, and the NULISA NeuroData Commons, which further expands these platforms and geographies via a focused subset of CNS-specific markers across tens of thousands of biosamples.
The Road Ahead
As the AD Data Initiative community continues to grow, we are working to advance our scientific strategy, enhance and expand our product and service offerings, and empower researchers by supporting and enabling collaborative research. Our ongoing efforts include:
Recent Publications
Below are recent articles related to our work and/or informed by researchers and collaborators leveraging AD Workbench and other data sharing platforms and approaches to drive scientific discovery in ADRD.
Driving Research Forward – Together
Further Your Research: Visit the AD Discovery Portal today to explore datasets and request access via AD Workbench.
Interested in accelerating innovation by sharing ADRD data? Learn more here.