A large-scale study of brains of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease recently undertaken by researchers at Emory University School of Medicine. The findings of the study appears in Nature Neuroscience.
The analysis unveils a series of disease-related alterations in protein co-expression modules, which were not detected when examining RNA networks in the same areas of the brain.
The team is a part of a consortium of collaboration between government, industry, academic, and non-profit organizations. The key objective of the consortium is to develop new biomarkers and drug targets for AD.
In order to undertake this, participating institutions are employing multi-omic approach and other tools of systems biology to study the complex pathophysiology of the disease. This, in turn could help to discover new drug formulations and disease biomarkers. The team of researchers at Emory University School of Medicine is specially focused on in the field of proteomics.
The initiative involves employing an unbiased discovery approach by perceiving the proteomic changes that occur in the brain of individuals with Alzheimer’s. The key idea behind the study is to be able to characterize the full landscape of pathological difference in the brain of individuals with Alzheimer’s.
Earlier, in 2020, the team of researchers published a paper that could comprehend nearly 3000 proteins by examining images of hundreds of brains. The paper specifically covered characterizing proteomic changes associated with Alzheimer’s.
Based on the previous work, the team has now set out to dig deeper into the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s, and involves further examination of proteomic changes in connection with other types of -omic data.
This involved examining nearly 500 brains obtained from the Religious Orders Study and Memory and Aging Project and the Banner Sun Health Research Institute.
