The overall mission of the Penn Bioinformatics in Neurodegenerative Disease (BiND) Lab is to use multimodal and bioinformatic approaches to improve our understanding of the biological basis of age-associated neurodegenerative conditions. We focus on two disease spectra:
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Primary Age-Related Tauopathy (PART): conditions that share common tau pathology but are differentiated by the presence or absence of amyloid pathology;
Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS): conditions that share common TDP-43 pathology and but present with a range of clinical syndromes.
By testing biologically-grounded hypotheses with the use of novel analytic and multimodal approaches, the Penn BiND lab integrates neuroimaging modalities with genomics and clinical datasets to address the biological basis of heterogeneity within these aging disease spectra. In the course of this work, our lab also develops robust biomarkers including novel neuroimaging techniques that can be used to better diagnose neurodegenerative diseases, accelerate drug discovery of disease-modifying agents, and define essential clinical trial endpoint measures for emerging therapeutic trials.