Alzheimer’s researchers at Penn recently began collaborating on the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project to map out the genes that contribute to the disease.
This project may lead to the development of drugs and therapies for Alzheimer’s, according to School of Medicine professor Gerard Schellenberg, director of Penn’s Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics Consortium.
Researchers from Penn’s consortium will collaborate with scientists from Institute Pasteur de Lille and Lille University in France, Cardiff University in Wales and the Boston University School of Medicine.
“I think if we find genes, we will make a good contribution to understanding the disease, and that helps with drug development and therapies,” Schellenberg said.
Schellenberg, who has focused on researching Alzheimer’s since 1985, also said that the international collaboration will increase the number of Alzheimer’s patients and control subjects involved in the project.
“Through this collaboration we can get 25,000 [or] 30,000 people with disease, and the same number without,” Schellenberg said. “We should be able to find additional genes … There’s a great advantage to putting all of this genetic information together.”
Medical School assistant professor Li-San Wang described Alzheimer’s, which has no cure, as a “devastating” disease. He added that mapping out the Alzheimer’s genes will hopefully open doors to new treatment possibilities and expand current knowledge of the disease’s function.
“Despite some ongoing clinical trials, currently there are no effective ways to prevent, reverse, or even slow down the disease,” Wang wrote in an e-mail. “There are still a lot of questions about the disease that need answers.”
Schellenberg is optimistic that the work of IGAP will provide some of these answers.
“We hope it’s going to be a long-term project,” he said. “I think we’ll start seeing findings in the next six months, but we then hope to go on and do more joint work … I think it will be a very long process to find all the genes, but we hope this international collaboration can make that go faster.”
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