Subscriber Benefit
As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe Now
The Indiana University School of Medicine hopes to make significant advancements in Alzheimer’s disease research thanks to a new $16.5 million federal grant.
The five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging will fund a new research center at the medical school which will be one of only two centers in the United States dedicated to developing stem-cell-based models of the human brain to better understand Alzheimer’s disease.
The other organization receiving funding is Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School.
IU’s new research center—known as Microphysiological Systems to Advance Precision Medicine for Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias, or MAP-AD—will focus on better understanding a gene mutation associated with Alzheimer’s disease that was identified by IU researchers in 2023.
The center, which launched July 1 and is now ramping up its research, operates out of IU’s new $230 million, 11-story medical education and research building in Indianapolis.
The center will develop brain organoids, three-dimensional cellular models derived from human cells, to study various characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, the university said. For years, many potential treatments that showed promise in the laboratory using animal models failed in clinical trials. Brain organoids are expected to better represent the complexities of the human brain.
“We’re very excited about this center,” said Jason Meyer, professor of medical and molecular genetics at IU. “This kind of work has the potential to be transformative and hopefully impactful to the lives, in the long run, of people throughout the state of Indiana and beyond that either have Alzheimer’s disease or are prone to Alzheimer’s disease, or perhaps just as importantly, the family and caretakers of patients with Alzheimer’s disease.”
Researchers from the IU School of Medicine and the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering are leading the center.
Meyer co-leads the effort with a team of other IU researchers in various fields, including anatomy, cell biology, physiology, neurology, biostatistics, and intelligent systems engineering.
Center researchers also will lead studies and partner with the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute to accelerate drug discovery and development, according to IU.
Luddy’s expertise in artificial intelligence will help advance the research, Meyer said, because AI tools can help researchers analyze data and identify patterns that would be difficult or impossible to otherwise discern.
“To the best of my knowledge, this really represents the first really big project the school of medicine has had in the Alzheimer’s space that really has a dedicated, significant component of leveraging AI technologies,” Meyer said.
Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia, is among the top 10 leading causes of death in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC. The CDC projects that the number of people living with the disease will double from 6.9 million in 2020 to nearly 14 million by 2060.
Researchers still don’t fully understand the causes of the disease, for which there is currently no known treatment.
Meyer said Alzheimer’s is challenging for researchers because the disease is so complex.
“When you have so many moving targets,” he said, “it’s been really difficult to really pin everything down to try to move this field forward significantly towards the development of therapeutics for this disease.”
Please enable JavaScript to view this content.
Sped it fast before RFK, Jr claws it back, especially if the cure includes a vaccine of any type. Hope it is a pill for the sake of the research. Pill good, vaccine bad says RFK, Jr.