The National Institute on Aging is awarding $25 million to the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor and Indiana University to support a new effort to combat Alzheimer’s disease.
Jackson Laboratory Associate Professor Gareth Howell says the Alzheimer’s Disease Precision Models Center will aim to create new mouse models for testing of drugs to fight the disease. He says the funds will let them efficiently test, in mice, many potential genetic variants that have been identified in humans.
“To identify combinations of gene changes that will hopefully lead to an Alzheimer’s disease in mice that much, much more closely resembles what we see in humans,” he says.
Howell says, in addition, key therapies will be tested in the mice in a way that is standardized and reproducible.