First international project in genetics of Alzheimer’s is launched

A new international collaboration to discover and map genes that play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s disease has been launched to pull together the work of four of the leading research groups in the field.

The International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project (IGAP) aims to completely understand the role inheritance plays in Alzheimer’s disease. The project will work to identify all the genes that contribute to the risk of developing the disease, drawing on combined genetic data from a large number of Alzheimer’s disease subjects and data from an equally large number of elderly people who do not have Alzheimer’s.

In the initial phase of the work, more than 20,000 people with Alzheimer’s and about 20,000 healthy elderly subjects will be compared. As the study progresses, 10,000 additional people with Alzheimer’s and the same number of healthy elderly subjects will be added to the study.

The subjects for these studies come from Alzheimer’s research projects across Europe, the US, and Canada. The four groups are:

• The European Alzheimer’s Disease Initiative (EADI) in France led by Philippe Amouyel, at the Institute Pasteur de Lille and Lille University;
• The Alzheimer’s Disease Genetics Consortium (ADGC) from the US led by Gerard Schellenberg at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine;
• The Genetic and Environmental Risk in Alzheimer’s Disease (GERAD) from the UK led by Julie Williams at Cardiff University;
• The neurology subgroup of the Cohorts for Heart and Ageing in Genomic Epidemiology (CHARGE) led by Sudha Seshadri at Boston University School of Medicine.

Identification of genes that contribute to Alzheimer’s risk and that influence the progression of disease will help lead to the cause of the disease, identify proteins and other new targets for drug development, and provide genetic methods for determining which people are at greatest risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

While each of the four groups is currently working with thousands of participants, they recognise that only by working together can they amass a large enough collection of participants to accelerate gene discovery. Formation of IGAP creates a shared database that includes genetic data for the more than 40,000 individuals.

The formation of IGAP is supported by two research charities Alzheimer’s Association and the Fondation Plan Alzheimer.