Turning Point

It’s been called the final frontier of medicine, the real health care moonshot, the holy grail of science.

Alzheimer’s disease — the most feared of all maladies, with no way to cure, stop or even slow its insidious progression.

But now, after decades of perseverance in the lab, researchers are on the cusp of a scientific breakthrough that could be the first step toward making Alzheimer’s itself a distant memory.

In the gripping new documentary Turning Point, acclaimed filmmaker James Keach takes us inside the quest for the first medication that that could treat the underlying process of Alzheimer’s disease, more than a century after Dr. Alois Alzheimer first described the brain disorder that slowly destroys memory and cognitive skills. Along the way, we meet the people behind these grand experiments, the scientists driven as much by personal conviction as professional innovation. And we discover why medical science is never easy, often unpredictable and potentially perilous – and, as America’s preeminent scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson reminds us, always worth the pursuit.

Turning Point follows Keach’s award-winning documentary Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me, an intimate portrait of music superstar Glen Campbell’s final tour after revealing he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Keach has become a passionate advocate for Alzheimer’s disease research, and after meeting some of the researchers advancing new treatments through clinical trials, committed his storytelling genius to a second film dealing with Alzheimer’s – only this time, it’s the scientists, not the artist, who take center stage.

Turning Point takes on some of the complex issues facing our American healthcare system, including the ongoing debate over the value of medicines. The film also addresses the public health tsunami that will hit the country as Baby Boomers age, with the disease projected to nearly triple in the next 30 years.