# The Development of a High Throughput Whole Brain Alzheimer's Disease Drug Screening Pipeline

> **NIH NIH R44** · TISSUEVISION, INC. · 2020 · $950,980

## Abstract

Project Summary
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting roughly 1 in
10 people over the age of 65. In 2017, the total cost of AD in the United States was
estimated at $259 billion and is predicted to climb to $1.1 trillion by the year 2050. Despite
enormous efforts invested in finding a cure, it has proven extremely difficult to develop
treatments for AD. Contributing factors behind this difficulty is that AD is a complex,
multifactorial disease, occurring over decades, and as CNS disease, is very difficult to study
directly in the clinic.
To address this challenge, the 2015 AD research summit set a goal to create and
characterize a new generation of improved research models that would more faithfully
reflect AD in humans. These new models hold enormous promise, but unfortunately
contemporary tools are incomplete at best. Phenotypic whole brain methodologies, while
providing a critical overview of the temporal and spatial progression of AD, have little
corresponding molecular information. Meanwhile, in depth molecular methods remain
confined to studying small portions of the brain due to time or cost limitations. This lack of
an overview of the molecular mechanisms driving the spread of AD across the brain – a
central aspect of AD in humans – leaves a crucial gap in our understanding of the etiology
of the progression of AD and hinders the development of effective treatments. To bridge
this gap, this proposal will build a flexible imaging and tissue processing platform to
rapidly characterize AD rodent models that provides whole brain information while at the
same time extends access to in-depth molecular information to facilitate crucial clinical
translatability.
This proposal combines teams from TissueVision and the NIA-funded MODEL-AD Center
at The Jackson Laboratory who are experts in neuroscience, optical microscopy, imaging
assays, and who have a successful commercialization history. Together, we will build on a
set of impressive preliminary results mapping AD progression in whole brain datasets and
produce a drug development pipeline to provide automated brain region mapping and
combinatorial markers of AD pathology. We believe the synergy between instrumentation,
biological assay development, and the next generation of AD research models represents
an ideal partnership to develop next generation tools that hold the promise of finally
developing effective treatments for AD.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10144290
- **Project number:** 4R44AG062017-02
- **Recipient organization:** TISSUEVISION, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Adam A Bleckert
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $950,980
- **Award type:** 4N
- **Project period:** 2018-09-30 → 2022-04-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10144290

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10144290, The Development of a High Throughput Whole Brain Alzheimer's Disease Drug Screening Pipeline (4R44AG062017-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10144290. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*