# Resilience/Resistance to Alzheimer's Disease in Centenarians and Offspring (RADCO)

> **NIH NIH U19** · BOSTON UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CAMPUS · 2021 · $4,278,987

## Abstract

Overall Component Summary
Centenarians delay age-related diseases and disabilities into their mid-nineties. Some remain
cognitively intact despite extreme exposure to the strongest risk factor for cognitive impairment
and AD, aging. The overall hypothesis of this study, titled “Resilience/Resistance to AD in
Centenarians and Offspring” (RADCO), is: centenarian cognitive superagers and some of their
offspring have protective factors that confer such resilience or in some cases, even resistance
against cognitive decline and dementia. RADCO assembles an unprecedentedly large sample of
prospectively studied centenarian cognitive superagers (n=495, essentially, centenarians with
cognitive function that falls within the norms of septuagenarians) along with offspring (n=600) and
offspring spouses (n=120), who, via RADCO cores, undergo careful, comprehensive and cutting
edge neuropsychological, biomarker, neuroimaging and neuropathological phenotyping. These
data are used by two projects with the overall scientific objective of gauging cognitive resilience
in this sample, understanding the underlying protective biology and translating that into
therapeutic targets. The Cognitive Resilience and Resistance Phenotypes Project (Project 1)
gauges resilience by neuroimaging, plasma AD biomarkers risk and neuropathology and therefore
generates a range of resilience endophenotypes. The Protective Factors and Mechanisms Project
(Project 2) is the translation arm of RADCO; it discovers genes, candidate biological pathways
and sets of mi-RNA regulators associated with the resilience endophenotypes characterized in
Project 1. In-vitro models of AD incorporate cortical neurons, microglial cells and astrocytes
created from centenarian cognitive superager induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines are used
to test the candidate pathways for how they cause resilience against AD.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10276389
- **Project number:** 1U19AG073172-01
- **Recipient organization:** BOSTON UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CAMPUS
- **Principal Investigator:** Stacy Andersen
- **Activity code:** U19 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $4,278,987
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2021-09-30 → 2026-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10276389

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10276389, Resilience/Resistance to Alzheimer's Disease in Centenarians and Offspring (RADCO) (1U19AG073172-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10276389. Licensed CC0.

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