Integrated multimodal cell atlas of Alzheimer’s disease

Interviewer: We're joined today by Professor Michael Hawrylycz from the Allen Institute to discuss his recent publication in Nature Neuroscience presenting an integrated multimodal cell atlas of Alzheimer's disease. Professor Hawrylycz, thank you very much for coming today. Dr. Hawrylycz: Thank you. I'm very happy to be here as part of HSTalks. Interviewer: To start off, could you start with a bit of background on what led your group to undertake a multimodal approach for studying Alzheimer's, and what are the key advantages of this approach over previous research methods? Dr. Hawrylycz: As we know, Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia in older adults, and it is a disease for which progress has been limited and treatments have been somewhat ineffective. Scientists now realize that we really need to understand the molecular basis of the disease better. Exactly how the associated proteins accumulate. What are the mechanisms driving AD progression? And what are vulnerable cell populations that are affected in the course of the disease? Several groups are now actually pursuing this approach by using single-cell technologies to explore vulnerabilities of cell types. What we did was essentially, we had access to a very strong team of neuropathologists as well as molecular scientists, and we were able to combine, essentially, a deep profiling using both neuropathology classical approaches to understanding protein accumulations and also the molecular basis and alterations or what goes wrong in the disease.