NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — The Mount Sinai Health System today announced that it has received a gift of $15 million from Daniel and Margaret Loeb to establish a new center for Alzheimer's disease research.
The new center, named in memory of Daniel Loeb's father Ronald, will support a network of research programs and related clinical initiatives across the Mount Sinai Health System focused on catalyzing genomic and other biology research in Alzheimer's disease.
Molecular geneticist and neuropsychiatric researcher Alison Goate will lead the new center in collaboration with Mount Sinai faculty members Mary Sano, Sam Gandy, and Eric Schadt. The Loeb center will also interact with several other Mount Sinai groups, most importantly its Alzheimer's Disease Research Center.
Mount Sinai President and CEO Kenneth Davis said in a statement that the Loebs' gift will have an "enormous positive effect on [Mount Sinai's] ability to bring together [its] core competencies in Alzheimer's disease research: genomics, bioinformatics, imaging, and clinical trials."
Goate, "one of the chief architects of the genomics revolution in Alzheimer's disease," according to Davis, has identified some of the key gene mutations associated with heritable risk for the disease, including a rare mutation in the PLD3gene that doubles the risk of developing late onset Alzheimer's disease.
She also led the largest ever genome-wide association study of protein markers for Alzheimer's in patients' cerebrospinal fluid, discovering three new genetic variants that may identify the presence of the disease.