For decades, researchers across institutions have peered into microscopes and dived into data to try to understand how diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) affect the brain. While scientists have made many important insights into these conditions, breakthrough therapies to cure or even treat them remain out of reach.
To expedite understanding of and treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, the Allen Institute launched the Brain Health accelerator. The project, announced today, is a global initiative that will leverage cutting-edge technology with the goal of improving modeling, therapeutic development, and the understanding of disease mechanisms. With funding support from the Allen Institute, the Bezos family, Amazon Web Services, the National Institutes of Health, EverythingALS, and other partners, the project financial contribution is $400 million.
One of the challenges in studying diseases in the human brain and identifying treatment strategies has been the scale and complexity of the organ. The brain consists of many distinct parts, and studying disease mechanisms requires samples from large numbers of individuals. Additionally, while technological advancements in transcriptomics, proteomics, neuroimaging, and AI have helped researchers study the brain in finer detail, researchers have not always integrated many of these approaches into the same project.
Ed Lein, a molecular and cellular neuroscientist, helped design the Brain Health accelerator. He will be coordinating the project as its executive vice president and director.
Erik Dinnel/Allen institute
“We really have a niche, I think, of being able to bring these technologies at scale to generate this sort of ground truth understanding of disease,” said Ed Lein, the vice president and executive director of the Brain Health Accelerator.
Indeed, Dirk Keene, a neuropathologist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) said that the institute’s focus on team science and ability to implement long term projects help them tackle challenging problems like neurodegenerative diseases. Keene was previously at the University of Washington, where he collaborated with researchers at the Allen Institute for several years and helped to facilitate brain tissue donation to researchers.
Keene will continue that work at UCSD, setting up and running a tissue coordinating center for the Brain Health accelerator. This site and the lab at the University of Washington, Keene said, will form a west coast network, but “we need to be able to do this across many, many different sites.” Keene added that the Brain Health Accelerator should be able to help do this.
“While we need to set up a network that's harmonized and modernized, we already have all the tools in place to really get going,” Keene said. The accelerator builds on advancements in neuroscience technology and findings from projects like the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, the Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas, and the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network (BICAN). These previous efforts led to the development of genomic maps and related neuroimaging data that allow researchers to accurately define cell populations and integrate information across studies; these technologies helped researchers demonstrate that pathology in conditions like Alzheimer’s disease is present much sooner than animal models suggested.1-4
“This was a pivotal moment for us to realize that we had the tools to actually get this ground truth information that could then really guide the whole field to new targets,” Lein said. As the coordinator of the Brain Health accelerator, Lein helped design the initial teams and goals of the project through a series of workshops, which helped synthesize individual research areas into a larger program. “The goal is not to do everything in one site; it is to bring together things happening that leverage the expertise across the field but do it in a way that sort of snowballs and piggybacks and brings data together in a way that hasn't really been happening so far,” Lein said.
The Biorepository and Integrated Neuropathology lab at the University of Washington sliced donated brain tissue to study the organ’s features in depth.
Jenny Burns/Allen Institute
The accelerator is currently planning to integrate data from transcriptomics, proteomics, neuroimaging, connectomics, and genetic studies. Researchers will map the data to references developed in the previous projects and then use AI tools to create comprehensive disease models. “It’s bringing all the different aspects of research together into what’s really a discovery engine,” said Keene.
Unlike previous projects, the Brain Health accelerator will not isolate brain diseases. Instead, the researchers will be studying how signatures of neurodegenerative disorders overlap. “I'm really excited about what we can do by integrating across different parts of the field and across diseases, and to really try to catalyze this field of human neuroscience,” Lein said.
Another major component of the Brain Health accelerator will be to apply and translate the findings from the project into therapeutic targets. More specifically, the researchers hope that the insights from the accelerator will lead to the development of cell-type selective therapies. Lein said that targeting specific cells in disease can make therapies more reproducible.
While the researchers will have plenty of challenges to overcome—including improving tissue donation and preservation; addressing logistical hurdles in data sharing; and coordinating with many different research teams, disease organizations, and industries—the project team is looking forward to what discoveries may arise.
“From the start of it—building the tools and the resource—all the way down to what we're going to find, I think it's a unique opportunity for me to end my career doing something that, I think, is going to have really critical, massive implications for our field,” Keene said.
- Keefe MG, et al. Lineage-resolved atlas of the developing human cortex. Nature. 2025;647(8088):194-202.
- Wang L, et al. Molecular and cellular dynamics of the developing human neocortex. Nature. 2025;647(8088):169-178.
- Nano PR, et al. Integrated analysis of molecular atlases unveils modules driving developmental cell subtype specification in the human cortex. Nat Neurosci. 2025;28(5):949-963.
- Gabitto MI, et al. Integrated multimodal cell atlas of Alzheimer’s disease. Nat Neurosci. 2024;27(12):2366-2383.
