Abstract
The University of Arizona will receive a $60M five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop and run a Precision Aging Network to investigate the aging brain and help develop more effective treatments for conditions such as dementia.
Diseases of the aging brain impact many people and are hard to treat. Precision medicine has already had success in other areas, such as cancer, and the aim of the new network is to try and apply these principles to diseases of the aging brain and neurological system.
In addition to the University of Arizona, which has a strong history of aging research, the network will also include researchers from seven other organisations including: Johns Hopkins University, Baylor College of Medicine and the Phoenix-based Translational Genomics Research Institute, or TGen.
The network will recruit 350,000 adult participants from across its different sites and collect demographic, lifestyle and health information, as well as cognition data.
Some of the participants will be asked to join four more in-depth studies. These studies will be designed to investigate the neural mechanisms that are needed for the aging brain to keep performing well and also those underlying cognitive impairment and diseases such as Alzheimer's disease.
