'Full of hope': Mayo Clinic Jacksonville gets $41 million grant for major Alzheimer's study

The Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville has received a $41 million federal grant for a potentially groundbreaking study to better understand Alzheimer's disease and how the brain disorder affects people of different ethnic groups.

The lessons learned could lead to treatment or even a cure.

"I am full of hope," said Dr. Nilüfer Ertekin-Taner, a Mayo Clinic professor of neuroscience and neurology and physician-scientist who is a co-principal investigator of the study.

The five-year grant from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, is one of the largest in the Jacksonville clinic's history. It will involve at least 80 researchers, from Mayo, Indiana University and 11 other U.S. institutions, and data from thousands of patients.

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"Alzheimer's is a global epidemic of this century and probably several centuries," said Ertekin-Taner, who also leads the Genetics of Alzheimer's Disease and Endophenotypes Laboratory at Mayo in Jacksonville.

The study is "a big deal," she said, because of the "vast" numbers of people affected by the disease, from patients and their families to communities. It will be the "first of its kind in its scope and reach," she said.

The results could be just as vast, according to Dr. Kent Thielen, CEO of Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.

"Mayo … is home to international leaders in neuroscience research who are focused on addressing the needs of patients," he said. "We are grateful for this investment in finding solutions for Alzheimer’s disease and the continued investment in our goal to translate research findings into treatments that can change lives.”

The most common cause of dementia, Alzheimer's disease is a brain disorder that causes a gradual decline in memory, thinking, behavior and social skills that affects a person's ability to function.

Deaths from Alzheimer's more than doubled from 2000 to 2019 and the number of people living with the disease is expected to rise to 13 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer's Association. There is no known cure, only methods to manage symptoms.

In the study, researchers will be analyzing medical data from thousands of patients across the country, as well as brain and blood samples from some of its victims. All that information will generate 20,000 different "molecular fingerprints" and 48,000 other features of Alzheimer's patients, Ertekin-Taner said.

Scientists already know that, when a person is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, "they already had the fingerprints of the disease" in their brains decades earlier, she said. Risk and environmental factors vary from one person to the next, so "understanding when a person will get it, whether they will get it, how the disease will progress, is extremely important," she said.

Researchers hope to identify the "next generation of precision medicine biomarkers" — precision medicine is using information about a person's own genes or proteins to prevent, diagnose or treat disease — as well as potential therapeutic approaches in multiethnic populations, according to Mayo.

"Alzheimer's disease afflicts patients from African-American backgrounds at a rate twice as high as that in white populations. For Latino Americans, the risk is one-and-a-half times greater than that in white populations, Ertekin-Taner said. "These populations have traditionally been understudied for Alzheimer's disease, leading to a major knowledge gap. When we try to understand the molecular underpinnings, the disease fingerprints, we need to understand it for all of us to be able to identify biomarkers and therapies.

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"Ultimately, we hope to find biomarkers that will enable us to predict whether somebody is going to develop Alzheimer's disease, how fast their disease may progress, and, eventually, to be able to find precision medicine cures for this complex condition," she said. "Finding the right therapy for the right patient at the right time."

According to Mayo, the researchers will:

• Analyze blood samples and donated brain tissue from African American, Latino American and non-Hispanic white Alzheimer's patients. The goal is "to identify molecular signatures that will serve as precision medicine biomarkers and therapeutic targets," according to Mayo.
• Analyze blood and brain tissue samples from deceased patients, some of whom had Alzheimer's, some of whom did not, "to identify molecular signatures linked between the brain and the blood," according to Mayo. The patients' tissue and blood was donated for medical research purposes.
• Analyze blood samples from patients with Alzheimer's disease, as well as unaffected individuals, collected from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging, the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, Alzheimer's Disease Research Center  at Mayo Clinic and five other Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers across the country.

"With the availability of imaging and fluid biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, it is now possible to track the disease process in living individuals in research settings and in some clinical practice environments," said Nandini Arunkumar, a program director at the National Institute of Aging. "The aim … is to use these biomarkers to map the progression of the disease across diverse populations and generate rich molecular data that will be the basis for the next generation of biomarkers."

Ertekin-Taner has been an Alzheimer's researcher and physician for 14 years. Delivering news of Alzheimer's has gotten no easier over time, she said.

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"I see patients with dementia and one of the hardest things is to give them an Alzheimer's diagnosis because we do not have a cure," she said. "I have hope that significant progress will be made. We're going to see a cure for this condition in our lifetime."

The two other co-principal investigators are Minerva Carrasquillo, a Mayo neuroscientist, and Indiana University School of Medicine's Andrew Saykin, director of the Indiana Alzheimer Disease Center, and Kwangsik Nho, associate professor of radiology and imaging sciences.

Other collaborating institutions are Sage Bionetworks; Washington University in St. Louis; University of Florida; Duke University; Emory University; Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute; University of Pennsylvania; University of Michigan; University of Washington; Cornell University; and Helmholtz Center.

bcravey@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4109