Three AGP papers shed new light on AD genetics

27. February 2026

Within the framework of the Alzheimer’s Genome Project (AGP; led by long-standing LIGA collaborator Prof. Rudolph E. Tanzi at Harvard Medical School), our group has co-authored three new papers that significantly expand the genetic landscape of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The first study by Willet et al., published in Alzheimers and Dementia, utilized an innovative analytical framework—matching heterogeneous cohorts via projected principal components—to mitigate genomic inflation, leading to the discovery of two novel AD-associated genes specifically within the Hispanic population. The second paper by Castanho et al., published in Molecular Neurodegeneration, investigates the molecular hallmarks of excitatory and inhibitory neuronal resilience to AD pathology, providing fresh insights into how specific cell types withstand neurodegeneration. Finally, the third study led by Gauron et al., published in Science Signaling, identifies a specific PKCη missense mutation that enhances Golgi-localized signaling, revealing its robust association with recessively inherited familial AD. The AGP is an international collaborative project running since 2005 and generously funded by the Cure Alzheimers Fund. AGP seeks to identify and characterize novel Alzheimer’s disease (AD) genes using extensive genetic databases based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS), whole genome sequencing (WGS), and whole exome sequencing (WES) data. Since 2024, LIGA is an active contributing site to the AGP with an extension to the STaR-AD project.