Alzheimer's disease affects more than 5.4 million Americans, and will soar to more than 11 million by 2040. The direct costs associated with caring for AD patients in the U.S. alone are $183 billion annually. Seventy percent of the 5.4 million U.S. Alzheimer's patients live at home, where 14.9 million Americans, most of them women, provide 17 billion hours of unpaid care for them at a total cost of $202 billion. There are no disease-modifying treatments available to fundamentally halt the progress of Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Catalano will describe her journey from scientist to entrepreneur, and outline the cutting edge science being done by Cognition Therapeutics right here in Pittsburgh to discover drugs to halt or reverse the underlying pathological changes in the brain that cause Alzheimer's disease.