Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Core

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Project Summary Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects about 40 million people worldwide today, and is the most common form of dementia found predominantly in elderly people. AD is a highly heterogeneous disease with major symptoms including progressive memory and cognitive domain deterioration over years, which eventually leads to death about 3-9 years after diagnosis. During the past few decades, many hypotheses have been proposed as potential mechanisms for AD, which involve multiple biological processes such as proteopathogenesis, mitochondrial abnormality, viral infection, and other glia cell-mediated immunological response. However, the disease etiology and mechanism still remain unclear, and currently, there is still no curative treatment for AD. During the past years, multiple endeavors have been taken by the AD research community to identify potential drug targets. Among them, AMP ADis leading the charge of generating drug target candidates based on evidences from multiple studies. With the large amount of data accumulated from these projects, it calls for deeper analysis coupled with extensive downstream drug development technologies to refine the target candidate lists and also identify potential new targets as well as possible drugs. The ADDD project aims to establish the entire workflow for this process and ambitiously discover new drugs for AD. As part of the overall effort of the our ADDD project, the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Core (BCB Core) will play a critical role in this team. The BCB Core will play three major roles. First, the BCB Core will lead the development of the infrastructure enabling curation, processing, analysis, visualization, and sharing of large AD datasets from this project as well as public sources. Secondly, the BCB Core will develop and establish advanced and novel data integration methods for predicting and prioritizing druggable targets as well as potential repurposing drug candidates for AD. Last but not the least, the BCB Core will provide bioinformatics data processing and analysis support for the entire project covering the lifecycle of the AD drug target identification and testing by closely collaborating and coordinating with other cores for the ADDD center.