The primary goal of the BU ADC Clinical Core is to provide resources and infrastructure to facilitate clinical research in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related disorders, such that data and well-characterized research subjects are widely available and shared with other investigators and institutions. During the current funding cycle of the BU ADC, Clinical Core faculty have made major contributions in several important and innovative areas of investigation, which include three general themes: (1) Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetics and genetic risk disclosure;(2) medical and environmental risk factors for cognitive aging;and (3) the longterm effects of repetitive head trauma in the development of neurodegenerative disease. Core faculty have led or participated in several high profile national studies and have facilitated and made possible major breakthroughs in AD-related research both locally and nationally. The longitudinal Patient/Control Registry is now fully subscribed with over 450 active participants and a wide variety of clinical research studies are being actively supported. Over this past cycle, there have been 1374 referrals of registry participants to other studies with 752 enrollments to a total of 38 unique research projects.
The Specific Aims of the Clinical Core for the next five years are:
Specific Aim 1 : To support innovative clinical AD research by identifying, recruiting, and thoroughly characterizing subjects willing to participate in clinical trials and other cutting-edge clinical research studies. We will leverage our resources to promote and accomplish wodd-class AD-related research at BU through our partnerships with the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy and the Framingham Heart Study and through our role as a leading site in national NIH and industry supported clinical research.
Specific Aim 2 : To establish research-quality diagnoses on all participants through multidisciplinary diagnostic consensus conferences and to collect and submit high quality data to the Data Management and Statistics Core (DMSC) for timely UDS submissions to the NACC database and for data sharing with qualified AD investigators engaged in cutting edge AD-related research.
Specific Aim 3 : To collect, store, analyze, and distribute biological samples from registry participants for APOE genotyping, DNA banking, and biomarker assays, to support high priority AD-related research.
Specific Aim 4 : To collaborate with the neuropathology and education cores to maximize CNS tissue donation for clinicopathological correlations and for other state of the art tissue-based research.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related disorders present a growing public health crisis. The BU ADC Clinical Core provides multiple resources, including well-characterized participants, biospecimens, clinical research data, and expertise to advance our knowledge of the detection, diagnosis, genetics, clinical course, prevention, and treatment of AD and related disorders.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 791 publications
