The AlzPI

Infections and the Brain

Chronic infections of the brain may contribute to dementia and other neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases across the human lifespan. For decades, microbes have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology, but demonstrating a causal role has remained elusive. The lack of standardized detection methodologies has led to inconsistent identification of microbes in post-mortem brain tissue.Collaboration across research and clinical disciplines—such as neurology, infectious disease, immunology, and others—is necessary to understand this complex, chronic, multi-system disease. Through unprecedented global, multidisciplinary collaboration, The Alzheimer’s Pathobiome Initiative is performing comparative analyses of microbes in post-mortem brains versus other human biospecimens, designing mechanistic models, and leveraging untapped data from population-based studies. Diverse microbial detection techniques, bioinformatic tools, and statistical approaches are being applied. Our goals are to provide a roadmap for detecting infectious agents in patients with the earliest signs of neurocognitive decline or psychiatric illness, while revealing mechanistic relationships between polymicrobial infections and disease pathology. Identification of infections, coupled with mechanistic and longitudinal data, will inform pilot studies using already approved antimicrobial therapies. Through this global initiative, we are identifying novel diagnostic approaches and companion biomarkers—and, importantly, establishing a new research framework and team science model to study infection-associated brain diseases.