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Grant Renewal

BU-Led Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program Receives $31.5M Funding Renewal

National Institute on Aging’s five-year grant will help researchers advance understanding of Alzheimer’s and related dementias.

The Boston University-led Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program has received a five-year, $31.5M renewal from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to provide the program’s primary operational and research support.

“We are very fortunate to have received this critical funding to achieve and expand the objectives of the Brain Aging Program,” says Lindsay Farrer, PhD, a BU Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine distinguished professor of genetics and professor of medicine, neurology, ophthalmology, epidemiology, and biostatistics. “It indicates the importance of this program to NIA’s mission to find better treatments and reduce the burden of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) on public health.” Farrer is one of the program’s original coprincipal investigators, along with Rhoda Au, PhD, a professor at BU’s schools of medicine and public health.

The program harnesses the power of the 78-year-old, BU-led Framingham Heart Study (FHS) and its 15,000 volunteer participants, spanning generations. That study is one of the longest-running—and most influential—of its kind, pioneering decades of cardiovascular disease breakthroughs that have saved millions of lives. 

“This renewed funding for the Brain Aging Program is critically important for us to be able to leverage the unique, long-term follow up of our Framingham Heart Study participants to understand the decades-long clues and indicators that let us know when cognitive impairment and dementia may start, how they progress, and how we can intervene to prevent them,” says FHS Director Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD. The chief of preventive medicine at BU’s medical school and Boston Medical Center, the University’s primary teaching hospital, he was added to the study, along with Jesse Mez, MD, an associate professor of neurology and coleader of the brain program’s clinical core, as coprincipal investigator for this funding round.

The heart study, which received a National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute grant renewal in February 2025 to fund its operations for the next six years, added the Brain Aging Program in 2020 as the largest of its ancillary research programs; these have expanded its mission from cardiovascular health to incorporate investigations into related health conditions, including cognitive decline, dementia, osteoporosis, cancer, and kidney and lung health. The brain program was originally funded by a $29M NIA grant.

“This is such a remarkable accomplishment, especially in this highly competitive funding environment,” says Vicki Jackson, MD, John Wade Professor and chair of medicine at the medical school. “As we think about convergence science themes throughout both campuses, it adds to the already strong opportunity for work in the aging space across the University.”

Heart study participants return to the FHS research center every few years to report on their medical history and have a physical examination. Blood and tissue samples are also collected, archived, and analyzed. Farrer says nearly all the current main study participants volunteered for the brain program, too, which involves detailed cognitive testing, brain imaging, and a neurological exam. They also can volunteer to be included in a brain donation program for postmortem studies.

One aspect of the grant renewal is enabling a wider distribution of data to researchers.

“We created a curated dataset that incorporates the most important variables related to brain aging,” says Mez. The team hopes that education and explanatory metadata will make the information more user friendly.

“When you take all of that together, we hope that the data will be more usable and accessible,” says Mez.

The NIA grant renewal also will help fund a mentorship program for early career researchers and research projects that explore vascular and inflammatory contributors to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), AD risk and resilience, and genetic vulnerabilities and variants. It’s important research that the FHS brain program is uniquely positioned to address, says Mez, who notes that 25 to 45 percent of people over age 55 are projected to develop Alzheimer’s or dementia in their lifetime.

“It’s a complex, heterogeneous disease, and the way to prevent it is to detect changes in the brain early and address risk factors,” he says.

Access to FHS data and biological samples across the participants’ lifespan provides a window into possible biomarkers that could help with early detection, before people show symptoms. A blood-based test was recently developed that could prove more cost-effective and easier to administer than brain scans and lumbar punctures.

“We know that these biomarkers start to detect changes in the brain as much as 15 or more years before symptoms,” says Mez. “What we will learn, I think, in this funding cycle is who may benefit from these tests, and which risk factors are particularly important to intervene on to improve these long-term neurodegenerative outcomes.”

This BU Brink story was written by Doug Fraser.