maybe this was because she didn’t want to talk about it. Or maybe
she didn’t remember. For years, her body was well but her mind
was dying. It was like watching the electric grid of a city shut off
one neighborhood at a time, until almost every street was dark.
Eventually, she was given a diagnosis of dementia, though all
this did was affirm the symptoms. And while Alzheimer’s dis-
ease accounts for about 70 percent of dementia cases, there never
seemed to be a point in finding out whether that was what she had,
because there was no treatment. This was true in 2007, the year
she died, when an estimated 5.1 million Americans were believed
to have Alzheimer’s, and it is still true today, as that number has
risen to 5.8 million (by 2050, it’s projected to balloon to 13.8 mil-
lion). Currently, Alzheimer’s is ranked as the sixth leading cause
of death in the country, after heart disease and cancer. (It dispro-
portionately impacts women, who not only make up two-thirds of
all Alzheimer’s cases, but also two-thirds of the roughly 16 million
Americans who provide unpaid care for someone with Alzhei-
mer’s.) Yet of the top 10 causes of death, it is the only disease that
still can’t be prevented, cured, or even slowed.
This is not for lack of effort. There have been around 200 un-
successful attempts to find a drug to treat Alzheimer’s; the termi-
nation rate of Alzheimer’s drug trials—upwards of 98 percent—is
so high that the field is often described as
a graveyard. This past spring, for example,
late-stage clinical trials for the buzzed-
about drug aducanumab were halted after
they failed to produce results. Between this
and trials’ cost, which can run into the bil-
lions, the work is not for the faint of heart,
but there remain promising prospects in the
pipeline, one of which is a vaccine, UB-311.
Developed by United Neuroscience, a
private biotech company founded in 2014 by
a doctor, Chang Yi Wang, and her daughter,
Mei Mei Hu, and son-in-law, Louis Reese,
the vaccine is years from approval. But re-
searchers claim it could delay the disease’s
onset by five years, which, beyond the hu-
man impact, could save families, Medicare,
and Medicaid more than $220 billion. “A
word of caution is that it’s a small study,”
says Drew Holzapfel, board member and acting president of the
nonprofit UsAgainstAlzheimer’s, referring to the research into UB-
311 so far. “But the initial data is compelling.”
Wang, who was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States
in 1974 to pursue a dual-specialization PhD in biochemistry and
immunology at Rockefeller University, launched her first compa-
ny, United Biomedical, Inc. (UBI), with her husband, Nean Hu,
in 1985. Since then, among other achievements, she’s developed a
foot-and-mouth vaccine for pigs that has been administered more
than 3 billion times. (Her secret to success, she says: “I was never
afraid of anything.”) Mei Mei Hu, an only child who attended the
University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, was working
for McKinsey & Company in 2009 when she learned that UBI had
encountered some business challenges in China. Hu had never ex-
pected to work with her mother. “She’s a brilliant scientist, highly
regarded in her field, and one of the hardest workers I know,” she
says. “That casts quite a shadow.” But she took a six-month leave
from her job to work with UBI, and within a year had officially
joined the company. (Hu, Reese, and Wang later created United
Neuroscience to have an entity that focused exclusively on vaccine
research for neurological diseases.)
Hu and Reese, who have two children, are based in Dallas, but
Wang and her husband still live in the home in Cold Spring Har-
bor, New York, where Hu grew up. Between the main house and
the guest house, the compound is sprawling enough that this past
winter, it hosted a group of people from United Neuroscience, who
finished up three days of meetings with an Italian feast they all
cooked together in the kitchen. The company is currently prepar-
ing to begin the next phase of clinical trials for UB-311, and while
the stakes are high—United Neuroscience has already invested
$100 million developing its vaccine platform—its founders remain
optimistic, not just about their drug, but about finding a treatment
in general. “The field is littered with failures, unless you consider
failures learning,” Hu says. “Every time someone has not succeed-
ed, they’ve taught us more about the disease and the drug devel-
opment process.”
It’s true that Alzheimer’s is now better understood. The current
hypothesis is that it begins, up to 20 years before symptoms appear,
with a buildup of two proteins, amyloid and tau, in the brain. This
then leads to amyloid plaques and what are known as tau tangles,
which, scientists believe, prompt cell death and memory loss. In
response, researchers have developed amyloid-targeting drugs,
with little success. (UB-311 operates by training the body itself to
target amyloid.) “The genetics data pretty
strongly suggests amyloid is causative,” says
David Morgan, a neuroscience professor at
Michigan State University and the director
of the Alzheimer’s Alliance. The question
is whether targeting it alone is effective,
and also whether, once symptoms have ap-
peared, it’s already too late. Treatment might
ultimately involve a cocktail of drugs, as with
AIDS, in other words; it also might need to
begin decades before a patient notices any-
thing is wrong.
For Wang and Hu, the work isn’t per-
sonal. Alzheimer’s doesn’t run in their fam-
ily, and Wang, who recently began running
marathons and last year filed eight patents—
“She’s prolific,” Hu says—only seems to grow
sharper with age. (“There’s a running joke
that you can email her at pretty much any
time, and within a few hours get an email back,” Hu says. “She sleeps
two hours at a time.”) But it’s more than a medical quest. “I used to
just focus on checking boxes,” Hu says. “But both my husband and
my mom are focused on the impact we can have on humanity, and
eventually I came around to that perspective, too. That’s what con-
verted me to wanting to work for UBI, because frankly, what could
be more impactful than solving something like Alzheimer’s?”
A challenge facing any Alzheimer’s drug trial that advances be-
yond the initial stages is finding participants. Researchers prefer
to engage with people with no other medical issues, and among
the aging population diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, this is rarely
the case. Another difficulty: Despite the fact that the disease can
now be detected more definitively via an amyloid-focused brain
scan, many people, like my grandmother, still don’t get diagnosed.
(It doesn’t help that amyloid scans are typically not covered by in-
surance.) “But the biggest problem is that people are not aware of
the clinical trials,” says John Dwyer, president of the Global Alz-
heimer’s Platform Foundation. Which is particularly unfortunate,
since they remain patients’ best hope. “The fact is, the first person
to be cured of Alzheimer’s will be in a clinical trial,” he says. “It
won’t randomly happen.”
MEI MEI HU (LEFT) WITH HER MOTHER,
CHANG YI WANG, IN 2018.BEAUTY ELLENESS
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