The University of California, Irvine has been awarded a five-year, $14 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study brain circuits that are susceptible to aging and Alzheimer’s disease. The research findings will advance the development of early diagnostic tools and the discovery of new treatment strategies.

Xiangmin Xu, Ph.D., UCI Chancellor’s Fellow of anatomy and neurobiology and principal investigator, will lead an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional team whose goal is to construct comprehensive, high-resolution maps of specific neuron types and their connections in critical brain circuits whose defects correspond with behavioral deficits associated with aging and Alzheimer’s disease.

The project team members are co-PI Kim Green, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology & behavior; co-investigators Todd C. Holmes, Ph.D., professor of physiology & biophysics; Grant MacGregor, D.Phil., professor id development & cell biology; Albert La Spada, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology & laboratory science; and Gopi Meenakshisundaram, Ph.D., professor of computer science; all from UCI; co-PIs Eran A. Mukamel, Ph.D., UCSD associate professor of cognitive science; and Wei Xu, Ph.D., assistant professor of neuroscience, UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.  The team also includes two members from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle: co-investigator Lydia Ng, Ph.D., and collaborator Hongkui Zeng, Ph.D., executive vice president and institute director.

Read the full story on UCI News.