Banner Alzheimer’s Institute to celebrate grand opening
PHOENIX (Oct. 24, 2006) – Banner Health will officially celebrate the opening of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute on Thursday, Oct. 26.
The event will be held at the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute, located at 901 E. Willetta St. near Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center. A breakfast donated by Outback Steakhouse will begin at 7:30 a.m., and formal presentations will start at 8 a.m. A ribbon-cutting ceremony and tours of the Institute will follow the presentations.
The Banner Alzheimer’s Institute is a research and treatment facility staffed by world-class physicians and researchers dedicated to providing compassionate care to patients and their families, while identifying effective treatments to slow and prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
The Institute is led by Executive Director Eric M. Reiman, M.D., a groundbreaking researcher and brain imaging expert, who also serves as director of the Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium, and Associate Director Pierre N. Tariot, M.D., recognized internationally for his research on drug therapies for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.
The Institute’s services include:
- A Memory Disorders Clinic, where dementia specialists conduct patient evaluations and recommend personalized treatment plans. The clinic opened to patients in July.
- A Brain Imaging Center, where researchers use advanced brain scanning techniques to measure the impact of prevention therapies in less time and with fewer volunteers than traditional methods.
- A Family and Community Services program that provides patients and caregivers with the support, counseling, and referral services they need to cope with the disease.
- Clinical research programs that provide qualifying volunteers with access to promising experimental treatments for Alzheimer’s disease before they are publicly available.
- Genomics research, conducted in partnership with the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), aimed at identifying the risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease and genetic targets for new treatments.
Featured speakers at the event will include national experts on Alzheimer’s disease such as Dr. Reiman; Harry Johns, president and CEO of the Alzheimer’s Association; Peter Fine, president and CEO of Banner Health, David Shenk, author of The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s - Portrait of an Epidemic; and Jerre Stead, chairman of the Banner Alzheimer’s Foundation.
The mission of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute is to help end Alzheimer’s disease without losing a generation, to set a new standard of care for patients and families, and to continue to support Arizona’s leading model of statewide collaboration in biomedical research. For more information about the Institute go to www.banneralz.org.
