Dr. Lindsay Farrer Receives Prestigious Zenith Fellows Award from the Alzheimer’s Association
Dr. Lindsay A. Farrer, PhD, chief of Biomedical Genetics at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has been selected to receive a 3-year, $450,000 Zenith Fellows Award from the Alzheimer’s Association — one of the most prestigious honors in Alzheimer’s research worldwide.
Dr. Farrer has served as principal investigator for large-scale genetic epidemiological studies of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) for more than 35 years. In collaboration with laboratories across the US and internationally, he and his group have identified genes causing a variety of rare and common disorders, most notably AD, substance use disorders, age-related macular degeneration, and others. He co-directed the international effort that demonstrated SORL1 is genetically and functionally associated with AD, implicating intracellular protein trafficking as an integral pathway in the disease, and his laboratory identified rare AD causal mutations in the AKAP9 gene specific to African Americans. He also leads the Framingham Heart Study Brain Aging Program and serves on the executive committees of the national Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium and Alzheimer Disease Sequencing Project.
Dr. Farrer’s funded project, “Genes to AD Therapy: A Roadmap for Personalized Medicine,” aims to identify genetic factors and mechanisms that influence AD risk with a particular focus on African Americans, leveraging data from more than 42,000 African Americans across multiple US studies and tissue from more than 325 African American brain donors to discover novel genetic mechanisms and biomarkers for the disease.