Home
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 vision for CNDR is to create a world with effective interventions to prevent and cure aging-related neurodegenerative diseases.” – Eddie Lee, MD, PhD, Director of CNDR
John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD | 1946 - 2022
In loving memory of John Q. Trojanowski, MD, PhD
Latest Research
-
Discovering Heterogeneous Neurodegenerative Disease Patterns From MRI Data for Improved Prediction
Saturday, October 10, 2026
Neurodegenerative diseases exhibit substantial heterogeneity, complicating both diagnosis and prognosis. Identifying clinically meaningful subtypes is crucial for understanding disease mechanisms and improving diagnostic precision and prognostic accuracy. Existing subtyping approaches primarily rely on unsupervised learning of patient data for capturing inter-individual variability, but they may fail to uncover subtypes that are directly informative for diagnosis or prognosis. To address this...
-
The mitochondrial epigenome and noncoding genome in aging and brain diseases
Saturday, October 10, 2026
The mitochondrial genome is a dynamic regulatory platform that extends far beyond its protein-coding capacity. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) harbors epigenetic modifications and produces diverse noncoding RNAs that influence mitochondrial function and cellular homeostasis. Evidence from animal models and human studies indicates that mtDNA methylation, mitochondrial-encoded noncoding RNAs, and cytosolic release of mitochondrial nucleic acids regulate transcription, metabolism, and stress signaling....
-
Comparison of automated white matter lesion segmentation approaches for use in large, multi-site data analyses in Parkinson's disease
Friday, October 9, 2026
CONCLUSION: Overall, of those we evaluated, U-Net-pgs emerged as the highest performing automated method across lesion loads and brain regions, for WML segmentation in PD and HC. The accuracy and reliability of U-Net-pgs, across various scanner and image acquisition parameters, make it a promising tool for large-scale analyses, facilitating future research investigating WML in PD.