Sage Bionetworks Launches the Agora Platform Making Curated Genomic Analysis of Alzheimer’s Disease Widely Available | BioSpace

"Sage Bionetworks announces 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. 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 study that highlighted a previously uncharacterized relationship of human herpes virus with AD...."