Cure Alzheimer’s is funding the management and continued development of a revolutionary web-based database. 

The AlzGene database is a revolutionary resource for Alzheimer’s researchers providing data and meta-analyses from hundreds of genetic association studies in an easy-to-use, searchable, web-based database. This site allows researchers to post their findings and comment on other findings. It aggregates huge amounts of information that will help in the search for the genetic makeup of Alzheimer’s. Currently, the database has more than 1,000 studies. The site also contains a continuously updated list displaying the genes most strongly associated with AD (on the website see "Top AlzGene Results").  Scientists interested in a particular gene can search for it in AlzGene to see what previous studies have reported, receiving a wealth of information in a very short amount of time.

A team of researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, led by Dr. Lars Bertram, developed the AlzGene database in collaboration with the Alzheimer's Research Forum, and has recently published a paper on this contribution to finding a cure to Alzheimer's in the prestigious journal Nature Genetics. 

Researcher: Dr. Lars Bertram, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Neurology, Assistant in Genetics
Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Lars Bertram is Assistant Professor of Neurology, Assistant in Genetics at the Genetics and Aging Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)/Harvard Medical School. At MGH, Dr. Bertram has spearheaded the analyses that led to the discovery of novel Alzheimer’s loci on chromosomes 9 & 10. His current research projects focus on searching and characterizing the putative Alzheimer’s genes underlying the loci identified in this and other studies. In collaboration with the Alzheimer Research Forum, Dr. Bertram developed and coordinated the “AlzGene database” project, a large-scale data mining effort in which his team has collected all of the nearly 1,000 published genetic association papers in the field. Using the same methodology, Dr. Bertram’s group this year launched two similar projects for genetic association studies of Parkinson’s disease (“PDGene”, funded by the Michael J. Fox Foundation), and schizophrenia (“SczGene”, funded by NARSAD). Together, these databases will allow interested scientists to find in one place detailed information about any gene that shows significant risk effects across a multitude of different study populations.