More than 55 million people today have Alzheimer’s disease, and its prevalence is expected to double in the coming decades as the population of older adults increases. Current therapies can help manage symptoms, but do little to prevent, halt, or reverse the disease’s devastating progression. This gap underscores a critical need for new approaches that target the underlying biology of neurodegeneration. Advancing research in this area offers the potential not only to change the course of Alzheimer’s but also to reduce the enormous burden it places on patients, families, and healthcare systems worldwide.
Alzheimer’s disease
Significance
Innovation
IBRI scientists and our collaborators are developing investigational therapies to slow or halt the progression of neurodegeneration, moving beyond the historical focus on amyloid and tau proteins to investigate the role of inflammatory processes and lipid metabolism in driving Alzheimer’s disease.
We’re also addressing a fundamental limitation to our ability to study Alzheimer’s disease: the lack of high-quality preclinical models. Scientists have been unable to recapitulate the physiological features of Alzheimer’s in mice, leading to unclear research results and poor success in human drug trials.
Finally, to support both future drug development and more individualized patient care, we’re developing biomarkers for Alzheimer’s disease. In the future, a laboratory test or similar physiological measurement could be used to select participants for clinical trials, diagnose Alzheimer’s before symptoms appear, or match patients with the treatment that will be most effective for their form of the disease.
Innovation spotlight:
TREAT-AD
The TREAT-AD Consortium is a National Institute on Aging–funded effort to accelerate discovery of new Alzheimer’s disease treatments. As one of two TREAT-AD centers, the IBRI leads work to identify and validate novel therapeutic targets, develop research tools, and share these resources openly to speed drug development across the field.
Approach
IBRI’s Alzheimer’s disease research combines state-of-the-art research capabilities with robust academic partnerships. Our advanced iPSC platform enables us to generate brain cell models from reprogrammed human blood or skin cells, allowing our scientists and collaborators to study neuroinflammation, synaptic dysfunction, and other drivers of neurodegeneration.
Within the TREAT-AD consortium, IBRI is creating novel candidate drug compounds for Alzheimer’s disease. Our researchers generate peptides and small molecules targeting prioritized risk proteins, then use our human-cell pharmacology platforms to evaluate target engagement, functional effects, and dose-response behavior. In parallel, as part of the MODEL-AD consortium, we’re generating better preclinical mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, deeply characterizing them, and establishing a standardized preclinical testing protocol for the benefit of the wider research community.
Our advanced iPSC platform enables us to generate brain cell models from reprogrammed human blood or skin cells
