Learn about the challenges physicians face in treating Alzheimer’s disease, what happens to the brain as the disease progresses, and current research on neuropathology and cell types in health and disease.
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Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia and leads to devastating cognitive and neurological deficits. However, despite affecting an estimated 6.2 million adults in the US alone, its causes are poorly understood, and no effective treatments exist to halt or reverse the neuron death caused by the disease. How the disease starts — and what happens in single cells and different cell types across the brain as the disease progresses — is similarly unknown.
The Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD) consortium is a research collaboration headquartered at the Allen Institute, with additional research projects at UW Medicine and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. These researchers are investigating the foundational science of Alzheimer’s – what happens in different brain regions, in individual cells, and across different types of brain cells in this disease, ultimately hoping to pinpoint the disease’s causes and new targets for better therapies.
