When results from a British clinical trial of a repurposed diabetes drug reached a leading medical journal in December 2025, the finding carried a quiet backstory about who pays for early science.
The study suggested that liraglutide could slow cognitive decline and brain shrinkage in people with mild Alzheimer’s disease. Years before those headlines appeared, the philanthropic record of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild had already touched this field through the family foundation he built around medical research. His giving offers a useful case study in how private capital underwrites experimental work long before any result is certain, and in how a single grant can travel a long way from the donor who signs it.
A trial that put an old drug to a new test
The trial, known as ELAD, tested liraglutide, a compound first developed for type 2 diabetes and obesity. Researchers recruited 204 participants with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s across two dozen clinics in the United Kingdom, giving half a daily injection and half a placebo over the course of a year. Professor Paul Edison of Imperial College London led the work, and the team reported that patients on the drug held on to more brain volume and showed slower cognitive decline than those on placebo.
The group, working on a phase 2b study coordinated at Imperial College London, presented its main findings at a major dementia conference in 2024, with the full paper appearing in the journal Nature Medicine the following year. Edison framed the outcome in plain terms, telling reporters that liraglutide appeared to be “protecting the brain, much like statins protect the heart.” The comparison signaled cautious optimism rather than a cure. The drug belongs to a class of medicines now studied for their effects on the brain, and the ELAD result added weight to the idea that metabolic pathways matter in dementia.
A funding chain that started with private giving
Trials of this kind rarely happen without patient funders willing to back unproven ideas. Edison secured support from three sources: a British dementia charity, a pharmaceutical company, and a New York nonprofit that specializes in early-stage drug work. That nonprofit, the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, operates on a venture-philanthropy model, channeling donations into projects that traditional funders often pass over.
The connection to Sir Evelyn de Rothschild runs through that foundation. Grant records of the charitable foundation he established in 1967 show sustained support for the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation across several years, including a grant earmarked for the liraglutide clinical trial at Imperial College London. The relationship spanned multiple awards through the 2010s, part of a broader pattern of medical-research giving that the Foundation has maintained since its earliest days.
The arrangement illustrates a layered model of philanthropy. Money moves from a family foundation to a specialist grantmaker, then to a university laboratory, and finally into a trial that may or may not succeed. Each link in that chain absorbs some uncertainty so the science can proceed, and each keeps the original donor several steps removed from the eventual result.
A disease that outpaces its treatments
The urgency behind this funding reflects the scale of the disease. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 55 million people live with dementia worldwide, with Alzheimer’s accounting for most cases, and that figure is projected to climb as populations age. Care costs run into the hundreds of billions of dollars each year, borne by families and health systems alike.
Progress on treatment has been slow and uneven. For years, drug candidates failed in late-stage trials, and approved therapies have delivered modest benefits. That record makes patient, diversified funding valuable, because it spreads support across many approaches rather than concentrating on one. A repurposed diabetes drug, a mitochondrial molecule, and an antibody therapy each represent a separate route toward the same goal.
Philanthropic money has a particular use in this setting. It can move quickly, tolerate failure, and support ideas that lack an obvious commercial path. The medical grantmaking associated with Sir Evelyn de Rothschild sat squarely in that space, funding questions rather than products and accepting that answers would arrive slowly, if at all.
Targeting the cell’s power supply
The Foundation’s interest in dementia science extended beyond a single drug. Its medical grants have reached laboratories studying the biology of the disease itself, including work on how brain cells produce and manage energy. At Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, researcher Eugenia Trushina has spent years investigating mitochondria, the structures that power neurons, and their part in the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s.
Her laboratory at Mayo Clinic has focused on a component of cellular energy production called complex I, and on small molecules that can adjust its function to protect brain cells. The approach differs from the amyloid-focused strategies that dominated dementia research for decades, and it reflects a growing view that metabolic breakdown appears early, sometimes before memory loss begins.
Support for this line of inquiry fits the pattern of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild’s medical philanthropy, which favored fundamental questions over quick wins. Grantmaking of this type accepts that many projects will never produce a marketed therapy. The payoff, when it comes, tends to arrive as knowledge that shapes the next generation of experiments rather than as an immediate cure.
A foundation built for the long horizon
Sir Evelyn de Rothschild created his foundation in 1967, giving it a name his father had coined from the names of his three children. The Foundation grew into one of the larger charitable trusts in Britain, distributing roughly four to five million pounds each year across medicine, education, social welfare, and the arts. Its own description of its work lists cutting-edge research into Alzheimer’s alongside economics and the arts, a signal of how central medical science became to its mission.
Health giving formed a durable thread through that record. The Foundation backed a children’s hospital nursing scholarship, hospice care, and cancer support services, in addition to the dementia research described here. The banker who directed much of this work, Sir Evelyn de Rothschild, approached charity with the same long view he brought to finance, where he led the family bank for nearly three decades. That temperament suited medical research, a field measured in decades rather than quarters.
The pattern also shows up in how the Foundation spread its medical support. Rather than concentrate on one institution or one condition, it funded clinical trials, laboratory science, and patient care across separate centers and countries. That spread mirrors the logic of a diversified portfolio, where the aim is to keep several promising bets alive at once. Applied to health research, the method reflects a recognition that no single laboratory holds the answer, and that progress usually emerges from many independent efforts pursued in parallel.
Why early money matters
The liraglutide result did not settle the question of how to treat Alzheimer’s. It offered a signal, one data point among many, that a familiar drug might slow the disease. Larger studies will test whether the effect holds. That uncertainty is the point of early philanthropy, which exists to fund the stage at which no one yet knows the answer.
Sir Evelyn de Rothschild died in 2022, and the foundation he shaped continues its grantmaking under the family’s direction. The science it helped support moves forward on its own timeline, through trials, laboratories, and journals far removed from the world of banking. The connection between a private foundation and a peer-reviewed dementia study is easy to miss, yet it captures something durable about how research gets funded. Discovery of this kind depends on donors willing to wait.
