On Oct, 14, 2024, a team of researchers from the Allen Institute of Brain Science and the University of Washington used multiomics, spatial genomics and reference atlases from the BRAIN Initiative to study cell types in 84 donors with varying Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathologies.

The research revealed that the disease has two disease phases: an early phase with a slow increase in pathology and a later phase with exponential increase in pathology and loss of neurons.

The Seattle Alzheimer’s Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD) consortium aimed to use these advances to produce the highest-resolution, multimodal, brain-wide cell atlas of AD and related dementias mapped to the BICCN foundational references. The study findings were published in Nature.