Ruvo center’s laureate

Downtown's Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health was born from big dreams and incredibly high expectations. When your goal is nothing short of finding a cure for Alzheimer's disease -- in Las Vegas, of all places -- no other approach will suffice.

Last week, facility founder Larry Ruvo made one of his biggest announcements to date, reporting that Nobel Prize laureate Stanley Prusiner has agreed to chair the center's scientific advisory board.

Dr. Prusiner will guide the work of Cleveland Clinic Alzheimer's researchers in Las Vegas, Ohio and Florida, an affiliation that will help attract more top-flight physicians and scientists to the center.

The timing of the news couldn't have been better, considering President Obama announced Tuesday that he wants to significantly increase federal funding for Alzheimer's research. The National Institutes of Health already spends $450 million per year studying Alzheimer's, a devastating form of dementia that afflicts around 8 million Americans. The NIH will add an additional $50 million to that budget this year, and the Obama administration wants an $80 million boost next fiscal year. The federal government's deficit-spending problem notwithstanding, a lot of those dollars could be headed to Las Vegas if this new partnership blossoms as expected.

Dr. Prusiner's credentials are extraordinary. He discovered the cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: harmful proteins he named prions. The breakthrough earned him the 1997 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine.

As our population ages, Alzheimer's and dementia will tear into more and more families. And today, there is more reason to believe that the help they seek -- and the cure we all pray for -- will come from Las Vegas.