The Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale, a French medical research charity, launched its ninth national mobilisation campaign against Alzheimer's disease on September 16, 2026, running until September 21, as new figures show the illness now affects more than 900,000 people in France, with 225,000 new diagnoses recorded every year.
Maxime Molina, president of the Foundation's executive board, told TF1info that research was progressing, pointing to advances in understanding the disease genetically and mechanistically, earlier diagnosis to direct patients toward clinical trials, and efforts to slow the disease's progression. He said none of this would have been possible without the generosity of donors.
Molina said the campaign was essential so that projects behind the therapies of tomorrow are never abandoned. Since the campaign began in 2018, the Foundation has spent 44 million euros on neurodegenerative diseases, supporting 239 research projects.
Push for earlier diagnosis
According to Molina, improving patient care remains the first challenge for researchers. Early diagnosis would make it possible to enrol people in clinical trials from the first symptoms, or even before symptoms appear.
Molina said Alzheimer's can begin ten to fifteen years before the first symptoms appear, without any clinical diagnosis being made. He said early diagnosis could help identify treatments capable of stopping or delaying the disease's progression before it causes possibly irreversible damage to the brain, and could prevent or delay its outward signs.
He said researchers were making progress on blood biomarkers. He described technology that already exists: blood tests measuring a protein involved in the disease, called p-tau 217, are beginning to be validated at the European level, which he said would make a precise diagnosis possible as soon as the first symptoms appear.
Understanding the disease's mechanisms
Molina said understanding of how the disease develops is also advancing. Researchers know that two types of lesions in the brain can trigger the onset of Alzheimer's, he said, but identifying these processes fully remains, in his words, a leading avenue of research into the disease's causes.
Researchers are examining genetic, infectious, vascular and environmental leads, including pollution, tobacco, alcohol and certain viral infections. They are also trying to identify individual genetic differences that raise or lower a person's risk of developing the disease.
Molina said genetic factors were responsible for 60 to 80 percent of cases, and that certain susceptibility genes, such as APOE ε4 or PLC gamma-2, carry a risk of developing the disease ten times higher than average.
New treatments and their limits
Researchers are also developing new therapeutic approaches to slow the disease's progression. Molina said care would likely move toward personalised medicine, using combinations of therapies tailored to each patient's individual characteristics and the stage of their disease.
The Foundation said in a statement that therapies given to patients at an early stage could slow cognitive decline by about 30 percent. It said, however, that these treatments are not currently available on the French market. Molina said the Haute Autorité de Santé, France's national health authority, considers their clinical benefits limited compared with sometimes significant side effects, meaning they cannot for now be made available to patients.
Molina said supporting all these lines of research gives the best chance of one day beating Alzheimer's disease. He added that researchers still face many challenges, and that the Foundation wants to place particular emphasis on infectious agents that may contribute to the onset of the disease.
World Alzheimer's Day
The campaign coincides with World Alzheimer's Day, and the TF1 Group is supporting the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale for the occasion. Alzheimer's disease affects 900,000 people in France, and no treatment currently exists to cure it.
