Seattle Researchers Team Up to Build Hi-Res Brain Map of Alzheimer's Disease

A collaborative research center in Seattle, Wash., has been founded to build high-resolution maps of Alzheimer's disease and identify how subjects' brain cells differ from those of healthy people, reports the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin . The center is funded by the U.S. National Institute on Aging, with additional projects based at University of Washington School of Medicine and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Their work will be based on techniques developed at the Allen Institute and elsewhere through the National Institutes of Health-funded BRAIN Initiative. The scientists hope to make progress into the root causes of Alzheimer's disease, as well as establish a foundational data resource to effect treatments of other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers will employ single-cell technologies originally developed via genomics research to define brain cell types by the complete set of genes the cells actively use, with the goal of identifying how specific cell types and their genes are impacted as Alzheimer's disease progresses. The center also could discover new insights into both people with a natural resistance to developing amyloid plaques and those who develop the plaques but never develop dementia.