New Ideas In Alzheimer’s Research

Congratulations to the 2026-2027 awardees of the UW ADRC Development Projects! Newly funded projects are using UW ADRC resources to explore cognitive resilience, the impact of social factors on brain health, and Lewy body dementia.

 

Kevin Lin, PhD, Assistant Professor, UW Biostatistics, UW School of Public Health

The UW ADRC Precision Neuropathology Core provides brain tissue resources for researchers to study ‘cognitive resilience.’ This term applies to individuals who maintained normal cognition throughout their lives despite the presence of Alzheimer’s pathology in their brains. These are individuals who would be expected, by all measures, to develop the cognitive changes of dementia—and never do. Now, Kevin Lin, PhD, will use resources from multiple UW ADRC Cores to develop new computational tools to understand the cellular biology underlying resilience to cognitive decline and to learn more from the data already available at the UW ADRC.

 

 

Tasha Rhoads, PhD, Assistant Professor, UW Department of Neurology, UW Medicine

The ‘social exposome’ describes the impact of lifelong social, cultural, and economic factors on health. Using this framework allows researchers to understand how social inequalities drive disease and health disparities. Now, Tasha Rhoads, PhD, will use UW ADRC resources to study how the social exposome relates to brain health, specifically among individuals who maintained normal cognition throughout life despite the presence of Alzheimer’s pathology in their brains, a characteristic called cognitive resilience. Her goal is to identify how aspects of the social exposome, especially neighborhood experience, are associated with increased cognitive resilience.

 

 

Oswaldo Lorenzo-Betancor, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, UW Department of Neurology, UW Medicine/GRECC, VA Puget Sound

When ADRC researchers look at brain tissue from cases of Alzheimer’s disease, they see the hallmark amyloid and tau proteins, as expected. But they often also find co-occurring pathologies, such as Lewy body-related pathology, the defining feature of Lewy body dementia. Recent studies have shown that co-occurring Lewy bodies accelerate cognitive decline and worsen clinical symptoms, compared to cases of Alzheimer’s disease without co-pathologies. Now, Lorenzo-Betancor, MD, PhD, will use UW ADRC resources to study how Lewy body pathology interacts with Alzheimer’s pathology and affects neurodegeneration. This project will promote collaboration within the UW ADRC among experts in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Lewy body dementia research, accelerating progress towards shared goals.

 

 

 

These projects are funded in part by NIH grant AG066509