CWRU Receives $2.8M Grant for Informatics-Driven Alzheimer’s Research
Researchers from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and collaborators have received a five-year, $2.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to identify FDA-approved medications that could be repurposed to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
With the grant funding, researchers will work to develop computer algorithms that search existing drug databases, and to test the most promising drug candidates using patient electronic health records and Alzheimer’s disease mouse models.
Rong Xu, Ph.D. is principal investigator on the new award and associate professor of biomedical informatics in the department of population and quantitative health sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The project builds on Xu’s work developing DrugPredict, a computer program that connects drug characteristics with information about how they may interact with human proteins in specific diseases—like Alzheimer’s. The program has already helped researchers identify new indications for old drugs.
“We will use DrugPredict, but the scope of this project is much more ambitious,” Xu said in a press release. Xu plans to develop new algorithms as well as apply DrugPredict to Alzheimer’s, building a publicly available database of putative Alzheimer’s drugs in the process. The database will include drugs that have potentially beneficial mechanisms of action and that are highly likely to cross the blood-brain barrier.