Interventions for Alzheimer's

Problem and Need for the Study 

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementia (AD/ADRD) are complex, multifactorial and heterogeneous disorders. Most current studies focus on drug interventions for AD/ADRD and currently none of pharmacological intervention (PI) discovery research has been translated into effective treatments. However, growing evidence suggests that non-pharmacological interventions for dementia (NPI), such as sleep, diet, dietary supplements, aerobic exercise, aromatherapy, light therapy, and cognitive training, offer promising opportunities for AD/ADRD prevention and management.

To leverage these opportunities this project focuses on developing translational informatics approaches to aggregate, standardize and discover the effects of drug and NPI candidates on AD/ADRD using multimodal data for Alzheimer’s research (i.e., biomedical literature, EHR, and clinical trials), with validation through animal models.

Innovation and Impact

To achieve our goal, we propose the following aims:

• Constructing a comprehensive Pharmacological and Non-Pharmacological Interventions for Alzheimer's Disease Knowledge Graph (PANIA-KG) from biomedical literature and other knowledge bases.
• Detecting, understanding, and visualization of drug repurposing signals of PIs, NPIs, and their synergistical effects for AD/ADRD using the PANIA-KG
• Re-ranking and validating individual and synergistical drug repurposing signals using multimodal data sources and animal models.

The successful completion of this project will deliver a comprehensive NPI Alzheimer's Disease Knowledge Graph, novel informatics approaches, ranked list of drug and NPI candidates, and validated synergistic intervention using multimodal data sources.