Neurodegenerative disease is manifest through interactions between cells throughout the brain; it is not a cell- or region- autonomous process and the pathology evolves in a complex way from primary dysfunction through secondary pathology or adaptive changes. Characterising these is central to the development of new diagnostics, monitoring or therapeutics. There is an immediate opportunity to rapidly improve understanding of these processes by exploitation of recent, transformative advances in multi-omics, imaging and computation.
We have established an UK DRI Multi-‘omics Atlas Project dedicated to the comprehensive, multi-omic mapping of the cellular pathology of Alzheimer’s disease over representative stages in its evolution (MAP AD). Multi-‘omics data will be made available rapidly for UK DRI and C-FoS researchers and, with minimal delays, to the scientific community broadly. Processes for data acquisition and analysis will be shared through an “open science” platform. Maintaining additional tissue from regions studied in the project and links to Brains for Dementia Research and Alzheimer’s Scotland brain banks would allow other researchers to access tissue from the same well characterised brains to extend observations. Its uniqueness as an effort would lie in the focus on disease, aggregation of data from multiple investigators working on the same, analysis of multiple regions of clinically well described brains and in its explicitly multi-omic ambition. The programme now has been initiated by the UK DRI. We are extending it to include data from a large collection of TREM2var brains, as well as larger numbers of prospectively AD and control brains.