The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, in association with the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative, announced the top four winners of the preliminary round of the first-ever challenge to identify male/female differences in Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
Each winner will share $50,000 in awards. They are:
- Enrico Glaab, Ph.D., research associate at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, University of Luxembourg (Netherlands). Project: Age-related gender differences in brain expression levels of tau-interacting ubiquitin-specific peptidase 9 and possible implications for Alzheimer’s disease.
- Kimberly Glass, Ph.D., and John Quackenbush, Ph.D., Harvard School of Public Health, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston). Project: Sex-specific differences in Alzheimer’s disease are characterized by unique alterations in cellular network structure.
- Elizabeth Mormino, Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital, Department of Neurology (Boston). Topic: Gender and the Alzheimer’s disease pathological cascade.
- Herve Rhinn, Ph.D., and Asa Abeliovich, M.D., Ph.D., department of pathology, Columbia University (New York). Project: Scarb1 as a Mediator of Gender-Specific Differences in Alzheimer’s disease.
From November 1–5, 2013, the public will have the opportunity to vote for the grand prize winning entry at www.geoffreybeenechallenge.org. The grand prize winner will receive an additional $50,000 award to continue research specifically in the area of male/female differences in Alzheimer’s disease.
The three candidates’ submissions under consideration for the grand prize are Drs. Glabb, Glass and Quackenbush, and Rhinn and Abeliovich.
“What better way to inform the science and mobilize women than to ask a research question that matters to them?” says Meryl Comer, president and CEO of the Geoffrey Beene Foundation Alzheimer’s Initiative. “The 2013 Geoffrey Beene Global NeuroDiscovery Challenge supports and validates this research focus for our next-generation scientists. It’s time to find out if what’s true in cardiovascular disease, with women presenting with ‘atypical’ symptoms from men, is also true for Alzheimer’s disease.”
For more on this challenge, CLICK HERE.
