Seeking biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease in multiethnic populations

April 22, 2023

Alzheimer's disease affects Black and Hispanic Americans at higher rates compared with white Americans. Yet people of color have been underrepresented in studies of the disease.

Mayo Clinic is leading a multicenter, multiethnic program that seeks to identify precision medicine biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The Centrally-linked Longitudinal Peripheral Biomarkers of AD (CLEAR-AD) in multi-ethnic populations project is funded by a $41 million grant from the National Institute on Aging.

"When we try to understand the molecular underpinnings of disease, we need to understand them for all of us. That understanding will allow us to identify biomarkers and potential therapeutic targets."

— Nilüfer Ertekin-Taner, M.D., Ph.D., a neurologist and neuroscientist at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, and co-principal investigator of CLEAR-AD

CLEAR-AD brings together more than 40 researchers from 13 institutions, with Mayo Clinic serving as the coordinating center. The other co-principal investigators are Minerva M. Carrasquillo, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Mayo Clinic's campus in Florida; Andrew Saykin, PsyD., director of the Indiana Alzheimer's Disease Research Center; and Kwangsik Nho, Ph.D., an imaging scientist at that research center.

The project will:

Analyze blood and donated brain tissue samples from individuals of African American, Latino American and non-Hispanic white backgrounds to identify molecular signatures that will serve as precision medicine biomarkers and therapeutic targets.
Analyze blood and brain tissue samples from deceased individuals with and without Alzheimer's disease, to identify molecular signatures linked between the brain and the blood.
Analyze blood samples over time from individuals with Alzheimer's disease and unaffected individuals, using large-scale cohorts collected from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging, Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative and five other Alzheimer's disease research centers in the United States.

"We will generate a vast and harmonized resource of endophenotype and multi-omics data from multiethnic cohorts," Dr. Ertekin-Taner says. "Ultimately, we hope to find biomarkers that will enable us to predict whether somebody is going to develop Alzheimer's disease, how fast an individual's disease may progress and — eventually — to be able to find precision medicine cures for this complex condition."