SEA-AD Study Shares Valuable Data with the AD Research Community

By Zoë Leanza

The Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD) consortium recently contributed transcriptomic and epigenomic data through the AD Knowledge Portal’s Community Data Contribution Program (CDCP). 

The contribution will help elucidate how different cell types are affected in Alzhiemer’s disease.

The SEA-AD data – single nucleus RNAseq, ATACseq, and Multiome – were generated using samples from 84 human donors who died with a wide range of disease, from healthy individuals with no pathology to those with severe dementia. 

The SEA-AD team provided the raw data from advanced single-cell profiling techniques as a tool for the community to investigate the brain’s diversity of cell types.

“Understanding how Alzheimer’s disease may selectively impact certain cell types will greatly enhance our ability to find meaningful therapeutic targets,” said Eitan Kaplan, a neuroscientist from the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a division of the Allen Institute.

Kaplan is the project manager for SEA-AD, which is headquartered at the Allen Institute and also includes researchers from the University of Washington’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. Led by Ed Lein, the team also maintains a web portal to help users visualize the data, connecting measures of disease to cognitive status and pathology. 

Ed Lein, lead investigator of the Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas team

“I’m really excited about this,” Kaplan said, “other research groups can use the web portal to explore the data and compare it to their own, and that’s powerful.”

The study is one of several contributed through the CDCP program, which lets investigators outside of the AD Knowledge Portal funded programs share data and resources through the Portal. CDCP launched in 2020 and currently provides access to data from ten different studies, allowing the scientific community to examine new hypotheses and explore different datasets.

“Alzheimer’s disease research is accelerating with the creation of these large multi-faceted, multi-site research efforts,” Kaplan said, “All this collaboration is really important, because it allows for more robust analyses that really weren’t possible in the past.”