Dr. Eric Schadt: "Advancing Alzheimer’s Disease"

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) made a trio of Alzheimer’s disease grants to develop a systems biology picture of the brain disorder. The teams hope to uncover new mechanisms and targets that may have been overlooked because of the field’s traditional focus on β-amyloid. An early stage grant went to a consortium led by Eric Schadt, PhD, Professor and Chair of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, and Founder and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, to pursue a computational approach. His team will probe 250 AD brains and 50 controls from a brain bank at Mount Sinai's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. Co-Principal Investigators Jun Zhu, PhD, Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School and Bin Zhang, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School, said that the human brain tissue studies will guide subsequent preclinical studies to test hypotheses about which genes contribute to the initiation of disease. “Data generated from human genetic studies, human iPS cells, mouse models and Drosophila models will be used to generate, test and refine our network models,” said Dr. Zhang.
-Dr. Eric Schadt, Professor and Chair, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Founder and Director, Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
-Dr. Jun Zhu, Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
-Dr. Bin Zhang, Associate Professor, Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

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