The GADIR project of the Ace Alzheimer Center obtains a grant of 800,000 euros to study Alzheimer’s disease.

GADIR, Ace Alzheimer Center's project, wins the Pasqual Maragall Researchers Programme Grant

Victoria Fernández, head of the genomics group at Ace Alzheimer Center Barcelona, together with Alberto Rábano, director of the CIEN (Centre for Research in Neurological Diseases) Tissue Bank, member of the national brain network and member of the Iberian Neuropathology Working Group, have joined forces to advance the understanding of the genetic and molecular basis of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, through the creation of the GADIR project.

The GADIR project (GenOmics and Digital Neuropathological Phenotyping of Iberian Brains), has obtained funding of 800,000 euros, which will go towards the study of brain tissue over a period of three years.

This funding has been made possible thanks to the award to the GADIR project of the second call of the Pasqual Maragall Researchers Programme Grant (PMRP), designed to promote clinical or translational research projects (on Alzheimer's disease or other age-related neurodegenerative diseases).

Dementia is a term that groups together a set of disorders that affect people's cognitive and functional capacities: Alzheimer's, Frontotemporal, Lewy Body, Parkinson's, etc., each characterised by the deposit of a specific protein in the brain. Despite advances in assessment criteria and the tests on which professionals base their diagnoses (MRI, blood or cerebrospinal fluid tests), in many cases the exact type of dementia cannot be known with certainty until after the person's death, when their brain is examined in detail and the proteins deposited are determined. On the other hand, not all dementias are ‘pure’ and we often find proteins typical of each disease together, creating mixed and complex clinical profiles.

The GADIR project will coordinate the collection of samples from more than 3,500 brains in Spain and Portugal. On the one hand, the group led by Alberto Rábano will be responsible for reviewing the neuropathological reports of the 3,500 samples, in accordance with the latest international criteria, and will create a digital bank of them available to the scientific community. On the other hand, the group led by Victoria Fernández will carry out genetic studies to investigate the genes associated with each of the different pathologies, as well as with all of them in the context of specific syndromes and diseases.

The results of this research will allow, firstly, a better understanding of the pathologies involved in each type of dementia and, secondly, to advance in the knowledge of the genetic bases associated with each pathology.

Thus, the GADIR project is expected to generate genetic profiles that will help health professionals to advise patients and relatives about their risk of dementia and, in such cases, to inform them about their possibilities for treatment or adherence to clinical trials, as well as to create a database of great value for all researchers working in this field.

This project was funded by the Pasqual Maragall Foundation within the framework of the Pasqual Maragall Researchers Programme (PMRP) (Aid Agreement 2023-1334)