On Jun. 13, 2017, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) awarded a $6 million grant to Cleveland Clinic to establish a national research consortium focused on improving the diagnosis and understanding the cause for Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB). The Dementia with Lewy Bodies Consortium will centralize research efforts and create a national, coordinated registry for clinical data.

The five-year grant, led by principal investigator James Leverenz, M.D., of Cleveland Clinic, supports a multi-center study aimed at finding DLB biomarkers which can assist with diagnosis, detect disease progression, and ultimately measure response to treatment. The consortium will receive additional funding from The Lewy Body Dementia Association (LBDA) to fund an annual meeting of investigators to foster data sharing, collaboration and discovery.

DLB is a progressive neurological disorder which is the second most common form of neurodegenerative dementia in the elderly. However, there are no drugs approved to treat the symptoms nor treatments that offer meaningful hope for a cure.

Through the new DLB consortium, researchers from nine clinical sites will collect clinical information, brain imaging scans and biological samples from more than 200 DLB patients. By collecting clinical data and biofluids (blood and cerebrospinal fluid), the consortium will create the necessary foundation for biomarker development and have a secondary benefit of developing an ongoing subject sample available for additional studies.

The disease is caused by a buildup of abnormal protein deposits, called “Lewy Bodies,” in brain cells. An estimated 1.4 million people in the U.S. suffer from DLB and the associated Parkinson’s disease dementia. Because symptoms can closely resemble other more commonly known diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, it is currently widely underdiagnosed.