The Picower Foundation announced it would shut down after almost 20 years because of losses it sustained when a prominent New York money manager’s fund, in which the foundation had invested, collapsed. The foundation provided $50 million in initial funding for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

“It’s obviously terrible news,” an MIT official said. “The Picowers have made an enormous contribution to neuroscience. Everyone here was shocked and very much saddened.”

As recent as last May, the foundation gave the Picower Institute $4 million, which created the Picower Institute Innovation Fund. The target of the fund was to provide support for cutting-edge research by neurologists on the Picower Institute faculty.

For example, the research included the use of lasers on brain cells to restore memories.

But this week, the foundation announced it would shut down because of losses it sustained, which it said were associated with New York money manager Bernard Madoff’s investment fund.

While the initial $50 million grant was fully funded, the MIT official had no comment on the status of other grants from the foundation to the school.

Founded in 2002 to study neurological disorders including Alzheimer’s, the institute was initially called the Picower Center for Learning and Memory. It was renamed in 2005. At the time, the $50 million represented the school’s largest single gift from any foundation.

Image: MIT

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“We advocate, based on these findings, that the criteria for the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease should include MRI scans,” said Dr. Ranjan Duara, who was the lead author of a study by Florida’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “By incorporating MRIs into the assessment of patients with memory problems, early diagnosis can be standardized and done far more accurately.”

Duara works at Miami’s Wien Center for Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders at Mount Sinai Medical Center where he is medical director.

As the most common cause of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease is often indicated by memory loss, disorientation, and deterioration of reading and speaking skills. Because other syndromes or disease’s share these symptoms, often the only way, previously, to confirm Alzheimer’s disease in a patient was by autopsy, which would show the affected brain area.

Previously doctors only used a brain scan to rule out other possible causes of the Alzheimer’s symptoms, such as a stroke.

Researchers studied 260 people in the Miami and Tampa, Florida, areas who were suffering some memory loss. The MRI showed atrophy in the brain regions commonly associated with Alzheimer’s and helped researchers accurately diagnose that the memory loss was from the disease and not from other sources.

Additionally, the study showed that MRIs can spot shrinkage in the brain of people not yet showing signs of Alzheimer’s. These patients began showing this signs as little as two years later, suggesting the scans can be an early predictor of the disease.

The study was funded in part by a National Institute on Aging grant.

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