UC Berkeley leads $28.6M federal project on neurodegenerative disease

Brown University Professor Nicolas Fawzi will direct Brown's participation in a multi-institution federal project funded with up to $28.6 million to better understand neurodegenerative diseases, miragenews.com reported.

The project, called NATIVE-ID, is led by the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and involves seven research institutions. It aims to develop new methods to detect and characterize protein misfolding in live human cells relevant to disease.

Researchers plan to create a comprehensive machine learning model to predict disease progression from healthy protein states to misfolding and aggregation, which are early indicators of neurodegeneration. This model and its training data are expected to identify new drug targets to preserve healthy protein function.

Brown's role involves developing tools and models to pinpoint problems across diseases caused by different proteins. Their work will be funded by a sub-award of about $1 million, with the goal of making these tools available to other research teams.

The project focuses on proteins with intrinsically disordered regions, which are implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases beginning with protein misfolding, according to Fawzi.