New Database Could Speed Up Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Research

Gates Ventures, J&J–backed biomarker data is free to scientists

Kristen Fischer,

AARP

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Published July 16, 2025

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Some of the biggest recent advances in diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative diseases center on biomarkers, the proteins found in blood and cerebrospinal fluid that can reveal when a certain disease exists, sometimes even before symptoms occur.

A new database — the largest-ever collection of data on proteins linked to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — is expected to help scientists speed up the search for effective treatments.

“The scale and depth of the dataset … make it an extraordinary resource with the potential to transform how we study, detect and treat neurodegenerative diseases,” said Simon Lovestone, global head of discovery and translational research for Janssen Neuroscience at Johnson & Johnson, in a news release.

Backed by Gates Ventures and Johnson & Johnson, the Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium (GNPC) consists of 23 institutions that have contributed neurodegenerative disease data on biomarkers from 35,000 blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples from across the world. The information will be available to researchers for free.

The GNPC is a perfect example of what is possible when scientists around the world work together, says Bill Gates, the founder of Gates Ventures, who teamed up with Johnson & Johnson to form the consortium in 2023.

“The results have exceeded even our wildest expectations,” Gates wrote in an editorial published July 15 in Nature Medicine, noting that consortium members studied 250 million protein measurements from blood and spinal fluid in its first year.

The value of the data

Around 2007, researchers showed that they could see protein changes in blood that reflect disease. But there’s been a lack of access to large amounts of high-quality, standardized data for scientists to use, says Carlos Cruchaga, a genomicist and director of the NeuroGenomics and Informatics Center at Washington University in St. Louis, who used GNPC data in his research.

The GNPC gives access to protein data spanning multiple neurodegenerative diseases, Cruchaga says. This can be especially helpful to understand similarities and patterns of neurodegeneration, which is still not fully understood.

Another advantage of the GNPC data is that researchers won’t have to start studies from scratch, collecting their own samples to conduct those studies. “That is going to open the door for new biomarkers and diagnostic tools,” Cruchaga says.

New findings rolling out

In his study published July 15 in Nature Medicine, Cruchaga learned more about proteins that exist at higher than normal levels in people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and frontotemporal dementia. The latter two showed the greatest similarities. Cruchaga’s team found out more about how the proteins operate in the diseases in terms of energy production, immune response, inflammation and protein degradation.

“Now [that] we have identified those common mechanisms, we could potentially identify interventions that are common across all of those [disorders],” Cruchaga says. He adds that he hopes the work may lead to new targets for treatments that can be tested in clinical trials.

Cruchaga is also interested to see how GNPC data will be used in models that can predict the impact of various risk factors as well as disease progression.

A separate study released July 15 in Nature Medicine used GNPC data to define changes among proteins in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid as people aged with and without neurodegeneration, which helped in spotting earlier changes that happen before the disease clinically starts.

“Once the clinical onset starts, we see those individuals ‘age’ faster than those that do not have disease,” Cruchaga explains.

And a third report released the same day in the same journal used GNPC data to identify unique protein patterns in people who carry the APOE-e4 gene variant, which is strongly linked to Alzheimer’s. The pattern could predispose gene carriers to neurodegeneration, but it alone probably doesn’t drive disease development. This means that modifiable environmental, lifestyle and clinical factors likely determine who develops the disease, according to the report.

As the world’s population of people 65 and older expands, cases of brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are on the rise and expected to double by 2050, emphasizing the need for the databank and robust clinical research, the GNPC said in a statement.

The consortium plans to add approximately 10,000 more samples, further expanding the new resource.

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Kristen Fischer is a contributing writer at AARP based at the Jersey Shore. She has also written for Health, WebMD, and McKnights and is the author of Zoo Zen: A Yoga Story for Kids.