August 31, 2021: $56 Million NIH Grant Will Expand Alzheimer Disease Research

Headshot of Dr. Eric Larson
Dr. Eric Larson

The National Institute on Aging is awarding a grant expected to total $55.6 million to the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study, led by Kaiser Permanente Washington, the University of Washington School of Medicine, and the University of California, San Diego. The funds will be used to advance the understanding of Alzheimer disease and to diversify and broaden participation in the study.

Read the full press release.

ACT is led by co–principal investigator Dr. Eric Larson, who is also a principal investigator of the NIH Collaboratory Coordinating Center. He leads the NIH Collaboratory’s Health Care Systems Interactions Core.

Larson founded the ACT study in Seattle in 1994.

“We have become a dynamic ‘living laboratory’ of aging,” said Larson. “Thanks to the generosity of the ACT volunteers, we can investigate years of detailed medical records for study participants—often dating back decades before the study began because of their Kaiser Permanente membership in Washington—and do state-of-the-art studies of the brains from those who consent to autopsy,” he said.

The ACT team also includes faculty and staff from Boston University, Columbia University, Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, the University of California Riverside, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Toronto, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.