The Rainwater Charitable Foundation has awarded the 2025 Rainwater Prize for Innovative Early-Career Scientist to Bess Frost, who leads the Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, a joint research center of the Robert J. and Nancy D. Carney Institute for Brain Science and the Division of Biology and Medicine at Brown University.
The prize comes with $200,000 from the foundation, one of the largest independent funders of neurodegenerative research. The Rainwater Charitable Foundation has invested over $140 million in research into neurodegenerative disorders related to tau, a hallmark protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease that is also implicated in many other neurodegenerative disorders called “tauopathies.” The foundation has helped move eight treatments for tauopathies into human trials.
According to a press release announcing the award, the foundation bestowed the award to Frost based on her groundbreaking findings on tau toxicity, which refers to the damage caused when tau proteins clump together and build up in the brain, disrupting cells and eventually contributing to symptoms like memory loss, mood swings or difficulty walking.
Early in her career, Frost discovered that tau protein can spread between cells the same way as prion diseases – rare, fatal brain illnesses caused by misfolding proteins called prions. Frost was also recognized for another, more recent influential finding. This one focuses on retrotransposons, DNA sequences known as “jumping genes” which, literally, move around inside the genomes of animals and plants and make copies of themselves. Frost’s lab discovered that these jumping genes are activated in Alzheimer’s and other diseases where tau proteins are a culprit, and also how this activation disrupts cells and causes cognitive decline.
Frost intends to sow her Rainwater prize money into this work. She recently led a pilot clinical trial testing a drug targeting retrotransposon activation to see if it’s effective and safe in patients diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s disease.
“Generous funding from the Rainwater Prize will help me and members of my lab to continue to push the boundaries of knowledge about tau and retrotransposons,” Frost said. “Most of the research on retrotransposons has focused on their ability to move within the genome, but we still don’t know all of the other ways in which they can drive toxicity. We have a lot of exciting work ahead of us.”
Along with leading the Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research, Frost is a professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry in Brown’s Division of Biology and Medicine and a professor of brain science at the Carney Institute. She came to Brown in 2024 from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, where she gained an international reputation as a leader in neurodegenerative research.
For more information about the Rainwater Prize, visit their website.