Sage Bionetworks Launches Platform to Crowdsource the Evaluation of Curated Alzheimer’s Disease Genomic Analysis

Sage Bionetworks on 7/20/18 announced the launch of the Agora platform (agora.ampadportal.org) an interactive, web-based tool that allows researchers to explore curated genomic analyses of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), including a list of early candidate target nominations for AD. The analyses accessible through Agora represent the culmination of over five years of research from the dozens of scientists that are part of the NIH-led Accelerating Medicines Partnership - Alzheimer’s Disease (AMP-AD) Target Discovery and Preclinical Validation Project. AMP-AD is a precompetitive public private partnership led by NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA) and managed by the Foundation for the NIH (FNIH), bringing together the government, industry and non-profit sectors to transform the way disease-relevant therapeutic targets are discovered and validated.

“Agora enables researchers to leverage AMP-AD analyses to advance their own scientific questions,” says Ben Logsdon, Director of Neurodegenerative Disease Research at Sage Bionetworks and the lead investigator on the Agora project. “These results were developed to answer questions posed by AMP-AD researchers, but they are broadly useful. Agora provides an easy tool to enable the exploration and reuse of these results by anyone.”

The AMP-AD program has generated a wealth of genomic, RNA expression, proteomic, and metabolomic data from over 3000 human brain and plasma samples collected in several NIA-supported AD cohorts and brain banks. The raw and processed data have been made widely accessible to qualified researchers through the AMP-AD Knowledge Portal. The datasets available through the Knowledge Portal have been used by the AMP-AD consortia members to produce hundreds of novel scientific research papers. In addition to AMP-AD investigators, external researchers have benefitted from the data sharing policy mandating rapid and broad sharing of data and have made critical new observations, including a recently published studythat highlighted a previously uncharacterized relationship of human herpes virus with AD.

Although use of primary data is typically limited to investigators with bioinformatic expertise, AMP-AD investigators have also generated analyses that should be useful to a broader set of researchers. The launch of the Agora portal represents the first time that the analyses have been shared outside of the AMP-AD consortia members, which should enable additional groundbreaking discoveries.

“The most exciting results featured in this early release of Agora is the AMP-AD nominated targets list - a set of genes and proteins derived from unbiased computational analyses of rich human multi-omics data,” said Suzana Petanceska, Ph.D., Program Director at the NIA, overseeing the AMP-AD Target Discovery Consortium. “These molecular signals could illuminate new disease biology or serve as novel therapeutic targets, she explained. “We are purposely releasing them at an early stage of the target evaluation process to allow us to integrate the input of external researchers and to crowdsource the follow-on evaluation,” added Petanceska.

AMP-AD is a project of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, a joint venture among the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, 12 biopharmaceutical and life science companies and 13 non-profit organizations, managed by the Foundation for the NIH, to identify and validate promising biological targets of disease. AMP-AD is one of the four initiatives under the AMP umbrella; the other three are focused on type 2 diabetes (AMP-T2D), rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus (AMP-RA/SLE) and Parkinson’s disease (AMP-PD). More information is available at the AMP-AD website.

Sage Bionetworks is a nonprofit biomedical research organization founded in 2009 to promote innovations in biomedicine by enabling a community-based approach to scientific inquiries and discoveries. In pursuit of this mission, we have combined science, technology, and governance structures to assemble an information commons for sharing resources and insights. The commons is used to support open research collaborations and innovative crowd-sourced analytical Challenges; it also empowers citizens and patients to partner with researchers through mobile health technologies. At Sage Bionetworks, we work to make science more open, collaborative, and inclusive.