UC Irvine Researchers Awarded Nearly $10 Million to Advance Understanding of Down Syndrome and Alzheimer’s Disease

UC Irvine researchers Vivek Swarup, PhD, and Elizabeth Head, PhD, have received a major new award from the National Institutes of Health to investigate a striking connection between Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease — research that could ultimately improve our understanding of Alzheimer’s for everyone.

The award, funded by the National Institute on Aging through the NIH INCLUDE Project for Down syndrome research, provides approximately $6.1 million for the project’s first three years, with an additional $4 million anticipated for years four and five. Altogether, the project is expected to receive approximately $10 million.

At the heart of the research is an urgent question: Why do the brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s appear so early in people with Down syndrome, and what can those changes teach us about preventing or treating the disease more broadly?

Nearly all people with Down syndrome develop the hallmark brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s by age 40, making Down syndrome the most common genetic cause of the disease. Yet people with Down syndrome have historically been excluded from Alzheimer’s research and clinical trials.

Addressing this challenge is important in its own right. Roughly 200,000 people in the United States have Down syndrome, and about one in five is clinically diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. But studying this connection also presents an exciting opportunity to better understand a disease that affects millions of individuals and families beyond the Down syndrome community.

Because Alzheimer’s-related changes tend to emerge along a more predictable, age-linked timeline in people with Down syndrome, researchers have an opportunity to examine some of the disease’s earliest biological changes. Understanding what happens during those early stages could help scientists identify new warning signs and potential targets for prevention or treatment before extensive damage has occurred.

Swarup, professor in the Department of Neurobiology & Behavior and Department of Systems Biology at the UC Irvine Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences, and Head, professor in the Departments of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine and Neurology in the School of Medicine, will serve as co-principal investigators. Both also serve as faculty at the UC Irvine Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND) and in the UCI Center for Aging Research in Down Syndrome (CFAR-DS).

Read the complete news article by the UC Irvine Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences.