Partnerships & Initiatives

Scientific Conferences

Tau Consortium Investigators’ Meeting

Since the Tau Consortium’s inception in 2009, an integral part of the program has been a twice-annual Tau Consortium Investigators’ Meeting (TCIM). This invitation-only conference is designed to support the collaborative efforts of our funded researchers. In many ways, these meetings serve as the backbone of our medical research program.

TCIMs provide a welcoming environment in which a small number of highly collaborative academic researchers can come together and confidentially share methods, results, and ideas across disciplines and institutional boundaries. Over the years, TCIMs have further evolved into an important crossroads for the broader community of tau researchers. In just the last few years, we’ve been joined by dozens of guest scientists from around the world. These special guests present their latest breakthroughs, challenge the group’s thinking, and help us to understand emerging topics in the field. Special topics have included neuroinflammation, brain trauma/CTE, artificial intelligence, and innovations in drug development.

TCIM has also become an important vehicle for the sharing of ideas among the major funding partners, advocacy groups, and other key stakeholders within the tau research ecosystem. In fact, many of the other partnerships and initiatives described on this website have grown from seeds that were initially planted at a TCIM.

A highlight of each TCIM is a personal address by a patient advocate who has been affected by a serious neurodegenerative disorder. Sometimes these speeches are delivered by someone with a close family connection to neurodegenerative disease. In other cases, it’s delivered by a diagnosed individual demonstrating extraordinary courage in the face of tremendous adversity. In all cases, these advocates keep us focused on the human impact of tau-related neurodegenerative disorders, and the need to accelerate our collective efforts in whatever ways we can.

Tau Global Conference

In 2020, the Rainwater Foundation, Alzheimer’s Association, and CurePSP co-sponsored the first-ever Tau Global Conference in Washington, DC. In launching this open, international conference, our goal was to provide a forum for academic, industry, philanthropic, and government stakeholders to:

Raise awareness and attract more funding to tau research;
Attract more talent to the study of tauopathies, particularly young researchers;
Increase alignment and collaboration around the remaining challenges in tau research

With more than 600 attendees, from six continents and all sectors of the ecosystem, the Tau 2020 Global Conference was a tremendous success. For a summary of the Tau 2020 proceedings, you can view the Tau 2020 Program Agenda by clicking here and/or session summaries from Alzforum here.

Planning for the next Tau Global Conference is already underway. It’s scheduled for February 23-24, 2022 in Washington, DC. Please watch this space for a registration link and other details.

EuroTau

Tau research is a global endeavor, with many of the most exciting discoveries happening through the exchange of scientific knowledge across national boundaries. For this reason, the Rainwater Foundation is a major financial supporter of EuroTau, a group of scientists who have been meeting since 2017 to exchange ideas and hypotheses about the tau protein.

The next EuroTau conference will take place October 25-27, 2021 in Lille, France. For more information about this conference, please visit the EuroTau website at: https://eurotau.fr

Grantmaking Partnerships

Tau Pipeline Enabling Program

In 2018, the Tau Consortium and Alzheimer’s Association came together to create the Tau Pipeline Enabling Program (T-PEP). Now entering its third year, the overarching goal of this matching grant program is to accelerate the development of new therapies for tau-based neurodegenerative disorders. T-PEP aims to enrich the “valley of death” drug development pipeline by facilitating innovative but resource-constrained academic projects to become more robust translational programs that pharmaceutical companies may be able to develop into drug candidates for human trials and commercialization.

In the T-PEP I and T-PEP II grant cycles, the partners awarded nearly $7 million to 13 talented research teams. Typically, these two year programs funded through T-PEP are focused on one or more steps in the drug discovery process from target validation and enablement, lead discovery and optimization, proof of concept in vivo efficacy and/or IND-enabling studies. The program is open to researchers at academic institutions as well as small companies.

As co-funders of the grants, the Alzheimer’s Association and Tau Consortium jointly monitor each program’s progress toward project milestones. Continued disbursement of funds is contingent on demonstrated progress toward key milestones.

To read about the winners from the T-PEP I grant cycle, please click on this link.
To read about the winners from the T-PEP II grant cycle, please click on this link.

Click here for more information: Partnership with the Alzheimer’s Association.

PIPETTE Consortium

The PIPETTE Consortium (Philanthropic Investments in PET TracErs) is a funding partnership formed in 2017 by The Michael J. Fox Foundation and Tau Consortium. The purpose of this initiative is to encourage the development of novel 4R tau and alpha-synuclein PET tracers for primary non-Alzheimer’s tauopathies, Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and other neurodegenerative diseases. As a collaborative effort of leading nonprofit organizations, the PIPETTE Consortium seeks to pool ideas, expertise, and resources to enable the improved diagnosis and treatment of multiple disorders.

PET imaging tools are crucially important to the field. They allow clinicians not only to detect the presence of abnormal protein build-up in the brains of living patients, but also to pinpoint its location and quantify its abundance. PET imaging is expected to be the most accurate way of diagnosing living patients with PSP and other atypical parkinsonian disorders. Taking multiple scans over time will allow doctors and patients to precisely monitor disease progression and treatment response.

Unfortunately, it typically takes several years and millions of dollars to develop a new PET tracer. For-profit companies have little incentive to invest in these tools, so nonprofits must often step in to fill the void. Given the complexity and expense involved, it makes sense for non-profits to pool their ideas, expertise, and resources to ensure success. PIPETTE funds projects with structure- and ligand-based drug design approaches that use state-of-art computational methods based on the high resolution cryo-EM structures of disease-relevant tau and alpha-synuclein fibrils and existing Structure Activity Relationship (SAR) on known tau PET ligands or alpha-synuclein PET ligands that are in development. In addition, the program supports in vivo imaging of brain neurofilaments of 4R tau and alpha-synuclein pathology that could be useful as biomarkers of the presence of disease and disease progression and as pharmacodynamic tools for drug development for tauopathies or synucleinopathies.

In September 2020, the PIPETTE partners launched a new grant program that is open to academic, non-profit, and for-profit applicants. Pre-proposals for this open RFA are due on October 22, 2020. To learn more, please follow this link.

Philanthropic Investments in PET TracErs (PIPETTE)

Click here for more information: The Michael J. Fox Foundation.

Prime of Life Brain Initiative

In 2018, CurePSP and the Rainwater Charitable Foundation launched the Prime of Life Brain Initiative. The goal of this grantmaking partnership is to provide additional financial support for the Tau Consortium’s collaborative research activities. Importantly, this partnership provides a way for CurePSP’s patients and advocates to support the many breakthroughs being advanced by some of the world’s leading tau researchers.

In 2020, funding from this program is being used to support the Tau Consortium’s Stem Cell Team. They’re developing the advances needed to better model neurodegenerative diseases in a dish using human-derived samples. For more information about the Prime of Life Brain Initiative, please visit this webpage.

Drug Discovery Outsourcing Services

In 2016, the Tau Consortium began providing drug discovery outsourcing services through a multi-year deal with WuXi AppTec, one of the world’s largest contract research organizations. More recently, we have further expanded this program through the addition of Charles River Labs and the Science Exchange online marketplace.

Under these unique arrangements, academic researchers who have been accepted into the Tau Consortium’s drug discovery program can access the specialized expertise and services they need to move their work closer to commercialization. Researchers enjoy expedited, world class services and retain full ownership of their IP. The Tau Consortium handles the vetting of providers, pre-negotiates contract terms, and pays the service providers directly.

Other Initiatives

PSP Genetics Consortium

In November 2015, the Tau Consortium and CurePSP jointly announced the PSP Genetics Consortium, an exciting collaboration among leading geneticists from seven different universities. These researchers, all of whom had been funded by the Tau Consortium and/or CurePSP, came together to abandon the traditional ways of operating in order to pool their DNA samples and analytical capabilities. By working together, the researchers are achieving faster progress and generating better insights than any one lab could ever hope to do on its own. Together, they’re producing definitive new studies of the gene variants involved in PSP.

To learn more about this program, please visit the sites below:

FTD Disorders Registry

The Rainwater Charitable Foundation has been a major funder of the FTD Disorders Registry since its inception. It went live in March 2017, and is available to diagnosed persons, family members, and friends who are interested in all forms of Frontotemporal Dementia, including PSP. As of June 2020, it had more than 3,500 registrants.

The FTD Disorders Registry is a major advance for the field, and is more than a patient recruitment tool- it’s a true research platform. The platform is capable of securely collecting and exchanging patient data with other research projects, including clinical trial sponsors. It is also able to administer IRB-approved online studies via questionnaires (e.g., tracking symptom progression over time).

Within just a few weeks of its public launch, the registry surpassed its first-year goal by enrolling hundreds of patients. Public reaction has been very positive. The Director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) publicly proclaimed that the FTD Registry was “a well-designed registry that will enhance knowledge and research capabilities.”

To explore the registry, please click on this link: https://ftdregistry.org.

PSP Research Roundtable

Progressive Supranuclear Palsy is a pure tauopathy and an orphan disease. It has attracted industry attention as a significant unmet medical need and an important steppingstone to new therapies for Alzheimer’s, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, and Frontotemporal Dementia. While there have been some successes in getting treatments to clinical trials, greater collaboration is needed to ensure that we understand how efficacious these treatments are and why the unsuccessful ones fail.

In 2017, the Rainwater Charitable Foundation and CurePSP stepped forward to create the PSP Research Roundtable on behalf of the field. Member companies joined throughout the year, and the group convened for the first time in June 2018 in Washington, DC.

The PSP Research Roundtable is a pre-competitive collaboration involving patient advocacy organizations, key thought leaders from academia, and leading bio-pharmaceutical companies. Its mission is to represent the field in addressing bottlenecks and accelerating the development of new treatments for PSP and other primary tauopathies. Specific priorities for the Roundtable are defined on an annual basis by a consensus-driven steering committee.

To learn more about the PSP Research Roundtable, please go to this site for information.

The Rainwater Prizes for Advances in Neurodegenerative Disease Research

The Rainwater Prize

Click here to learn more:

rainwaterprize.org →

Donations and Co-Funding Opportunities

Our medical research program is funded primarily through the estate of Richard E. Rainwater. To supplement these funds, we regularly engage in co-funding partnerships with like-minded organizations. We welcome inquiries from additional organizations and individuals who are potentially interested in providing major support for the development of new treatments for neurodegenerative disease. To initiate the dialogue, please contact us at information@rainwatercf.org.

We do not actively seek donations from the general public, but we graciously accept donations if they are offered. Personal donations can be made to our medical research program via the Rainwater Neurological Research Fund at the North Texas Community Foundation.

To make an online gift using your credit card, please follow this link: https://northtexascf.org/donate. There’s a dropdown box near the middle of the page where you can select the Rainwater Neurological Fund.
To make a gift by check, please write the check to the “North Texas Community Foundation”, noting “Rainwater Neurological Research Fund” in the memo section.

Checks may be mailed to:
North Texas Community Foundation
777 Main Street, Suite 2850
Fort Worth, TX 76102