Late onset Alzheimer’s disease genetics implicates microglial pathways in disease risk

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a highly heritable complex disease with no current effective prevention or treatment. The majority of drugs developed for AD focus on the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which implicates Aß plaques as a causal factor in the disease. However, it is possible that other underexplored disease-associated pathways may be more fruitful targets for drug development. Findings from gene network analyses implicate immune networks as being enriched in AD; many of the genes in these networks fall within genomic regions that contain common and rare variants that are associated with increased risk of developing AD. Of these genes, several (including CR1, SPI1, the MS4As, TREM2, ABCA7, CD33, and…

• FF
  Foundation for the National Institutes of Health

  Award: RF1AG054011
• JF
  JPB Foundation
• DT
  Denali Therapeutics
• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Awards: U01AG052411, U01AG049508