Millions of Cells, One Collaborative Effort: The PsychAD Consortium Advances Alzheimer’s Research

Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease-related dementias are complex conditions that can vary widely in their presentation and impact a range of functions, such as memory, language, mood, and behavior. Given the considerable variability in how Alzheimer’s disease affects individuals, studying diverse groups of people is essential to better understand disease mechanisms and develop treatments.

Alzheimer’s disease research has historically involved animal experiments, but species-specific differences in brain size and structure, genetics, and lifespan limit the ability of these experiments to accurately reflect human disease. 

The PsychAD Consortium was established in 2019 to address this challenge by collecting and analyzing 6.3 million cells from 1,494 donors with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, psychiatric disorders, and neurotypical presentations, and making the resource accessible to the scientific community. The team recently published eight studies, examining individual cells from postmortem brain tissue to identify genes, cell types, and biological pathways that differ or overlap across disorders and aging. Patterns that emerge can help uncover new targets for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, expanding our understanding of these complex diseases without the use of animals. The scale and specificity of this work may also help advance personalized medicine by providing insights that could inform more individualized treatment strategies based on patients’ unique biological characteristics and symptoms.

This effort is advancing Alzheimer’s disease research by making large-scale datasets available for the research community and providing human-specific insight into cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurological disease. These data and analyses inform drug discovery, prevention, and diagnostic research that better reflects patients and helps replace the use of animals. Learn more about the Physicians Committee’s recent efforts to reduce the use of animals in Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease research here.