ADSP Overview

The Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project (ADSP) is a consortium of National Institute on Aging (NIA)-funded consortia and projects that work together to elucidate the genetic underpinnings of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (ADRD) with the ultimate goal of improving the prevention and treatment of these diseases.

ADSP Objectives

  1. Identify new genes involved in AD/ADRD.
  2. Identify variants contributing to increased risk for or protection against AD/ADRD.
  3. Provide insight as to why individuals with known risk factor genes have a delayed onset or escape from developing AD/ADRD.
  4. Investigate the impact of genetic admixture on AD risk, resistance, or resilience.
  5. Maximize the scientific and translational impact of the genetic discoveries by ensuring that the large-scale AD genetics data, methods, and analyses are shared rapidly and broadly.
  6. Facilitate the uptake of ADSP resources by the external research community through effective outreach and communication.
  7. Develop metrics to quantify the impact of ADSP resources on basic and translational AD/ADRD research in support of NIA’s overall strategy to enable a precision medicine approach to AD/ADRD treatment and prevention.

ADSP Investigators and Components

The ADSP includes more than 400 investigators from more than 70 institutions across the globe. ADSP investigators work across several consortia, centers, and projects that focus on different aspects of ADSP’s work. Information about the major components of the ADSP can be found in the Project Structure menu of this website. A list of NIA-funded cooperative agreements and research grants that support these components and other ADSP studies is available on the ADSP Grants page.

Research Participants

The ADSP requires a large number of study participants to pursue its research objectives. The project utilizes existing samples (e.g. DNA and/or other biomarkers and tissues) from well-characterized, ethnically diverse cohorts that collect information relevant to AD/ADRD. Information about cohorts that have contributed samples to ADSP is available on the Cohorts page.

ADSP Data

Details about the ADSP genomic data and accompanying phenotype data and annotations are available on the Data and Resources pages. Researchers can obtain access to ADSP data through the Data Sharing Service (DSS) maintained by the NIA Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease Data Storage Site (NIAGADS). More information about the data and how to apply for access is available on the DSS website.