Years of support by the BRAIN Initiative have paved the way for the Brain Health accelerator, an exciting global collaboration headed by the Allen Institute aimed at understanding the cell types and circuits implicated in some of the world’s most pressing and urgent brain diseases. Diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, ALS, and Lewy body dementia have taken a massive human toll on society, including on Jeff Carroll’s family. Jeff is a researcher at the Allen Institute leading the Huntington’s disease research as part of the Brain Health accelerator. For him, the mission is personal: his mother passed away from Huntington’s and he also carries the gene and will one day develop the disease.
He and his team will rely on the single-cell genomics and spatial transcriptomics technology developed through BRAIN Initiative funding to parse the puzzle of brain disease in order to identify new targets for intervention that could lead to new treatments and therapies for the thousands of people affected by brain disease.