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Mission
The mission of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research (CNDR) is to promote and conduct multidisciplinary clinical and basic research to increase the understanding of the causes and mechanisms leading to brain dysfunction and degeneration in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), Lewy body dementia (LBD), Frontotemporal degeneration (FTD), Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Primary lateral sclerosis (PLS), Motor neuron disease (MND), and related disorders that occur increasingly with advancing age. Implicit in the mission of the CNDR are two overarching goals: 1.) Find better ways to cure and treat these disorders, 2. Provide training to the next generation of scientists.
“My goal for CNDR is not only to collaborate with researchers at Penn and from institutions across the globe with the mutual goal of finding better ways to diagnose and treat neurodegenerative diseases, but also to inspire and encourage the next generation of scientists on the importance of investigating these disorders that occur more frequently with advancing age.” – Virginia M.-Y. Lee, PhD, Director, CNDR
John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD | 1946 - 2022
In loving memory of John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD
Latest Research
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Basic Science and Pathogenesis
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
CONCLUSION: Our results provide insight into the underlying mechanisms of BP and AD. Ongoing efforts to harmonize BP and cognitive measures across several cohorts will improve the power of discovering, replicating, and generalizing novel associations with pleiotropic loci.
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Basic Science and Pathogenesis
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
CONCLUSION: The results demonstrate the risk of relying on unsupervised clustering for interpreting AD subtypes and recommend a framework for defining the subtypes, training clustering, and evaluating performance based on hypothesis-driven definitions grounded in the original postmortem findings.
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Protocol for the Asian Cohort for Alzheimer's Disease (ACAD) Study
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
INTRODUCTION: To address knowledge gaps in Alzheimer's disease (AD) research, the Asian Cohort for Alzheimer's Disease (ACAD) Study will recruit over 5000 participants of Asian descent aged 60 or older in the United States and Canada. The current focus is on participants with Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese ancestry, with the goal of characterizing both genetic and non-genetic risk factors. ACAD has assembled a culturally and linguistically appropriate data collection protocol, as well as a...