SEATTLE — The Allen Institute in Seattle has launched the Brain Health accelerator, a $400 million collaborative initiative to develop genetic therapies for neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and Huntington's. The effort focuses on gene editing and traditional gene therapy to create precision treatments for brain disorders.
The initiative has secured $400 million in funding, with $200 million from the Allen Institute, $100 million from the Bezos family, and $100 million combined from AWS, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and EverythingALS. Brain Health will prioritize research using both healthy and diseased human brain tissue from the outset and make its databases publicly available to enable global scientific collaboration.
Ed Lein, Executive Vice President and Director of Brain Health at the Allen Institute, said the latest genetic treatments allow scientists to control the activity of particular genes, opening the door to highly specific therapies. “The latest genetic treatments allow scientists to control the activity of particular genes. That opens up the possibility for very specific precision therapies for brain disorders.” He added, “We now have a complete description of the types of cells that make up the brain, and also the genetic underpinnings of their properties. This foundation then lets you study disease.” Lein also noted, “It affects very specific types of neurons that are lost early in the disease and then over the course of the disease.” He emphasized the scale of the scientific challenge, saying, “The challenge is so daunting, with the most complex organ in the body and enormous variation across the human population, that we need a cross-disciplinary, integrative approach to surface a deep ‘ground truth’ understanding of what happens to our brains as diseases progress.”
Jeff Carroll, who joined the accelerator after studying Huntington’s Disease in mice at the University of Washington, is focusing on a targeted genetic approach. “Since we know that all the bad stuff in Huntington's comes from this one gene, let's get rid of that gene,” Carroll said. He also noted the advantage of the Allen Institute’s large-scale research model: “It's difficult to do the scale of research that you need with a team of five or six or even 10 people. The hundreds of people they have here at the Allen Institute [allow for] an entirely different approach to science.”
Mike Bezos, Co-Founder and Chair of The Bezos Family Foundation, said, “Brain disease represents one of the great health challenges of our time. The Allen Institute's Brain Health accelerator brings together the scale, scientific ambition, and global collaboration needed to advance our understanding of neurodegeneration.”