Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have been awarded a $47 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to develop animal models to study the biology behind Alzheimer’s disease.
The funding, which will be awarded over a period of five years, will be used by a UCI team to develop the next generation of mouse models to study late-onset Alzheimer’s, the most common form of the disease. The new funding is in addition to $16 million in grant money that the university already received to develop mouse models to study early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Joshua Grill, director of UCI’s Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders, said the award “reflects UCI’s expertise and leadership in the national Alzheimer’s disease research ecosystem.”
“Our investigators are part of many of the most important initiatives in the field, from animal models to observational patient-oriented research to clinical trials of promising treatments,” Grlll said in a statement.
Researchers hope that by inserting human genetic data into the models, they can gain more insight into the causes of Alzheimer’s disease and hopefully set the stage for preclinical drug testing.
UC Irvine houses just one of two groups in the United States working on late-onset Alzheimer’s mouse models. Indiana University, the Jackson Laboratory in Maine and the University of Pittsburgh are jointly collaborating on the other study.
Frank LaFeria, dean of the School of Biological Sciences at UCI, who has been at the forefront of using genetically modified mice to study Alzheimer’s disease, will lead a team of colleagues to conduct the next phase of research. In 2003, LaFeria and his colleagues created the first mouse model to study the pathological agents of Alzheimer’s disease, and his team developed the first mouse model to study the Lewy body variant of the disease in 2010, according to the news release.
