Highlights
- The National Institute on Aging awarded Arizona State University $675,329 under project number 1R01AG097529-01.
- PI Jeffrey H. Kordower will study cellular damage and biomarkers in aged macaques engineered to develop tauopathy, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
- The project runs from May 1, 2026, through Feb. 28, 2031 — a roughly five-year funding window.
- NIA is the lead federal agency for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias research, a role it has held since funding Alzheimer's Disease Centers nationwide beginning in 1984.
The National Institute on Aging has awarded Arizona State University's Tempe campus $675,329 to investigate the cellular damage and biological markers that emerge in aged macaque monkeys after they are given a gene-delivered form of tauopathy, the abnormal protein accumulation central to Alzheimer's disease pathology.
The grant, project number 1R01AG097529-01, lists Jeffrey H. Kordower as principal investigator. The project period runs from May 1, 2026, through Feb. 28, 2031, according to the NIH ExPORTER database.
The award falls within the R01 mechanism, NIH's standard investigator-initiated research grant. At $675,329, this represents a single-year direct-cost figure for what is structured as a multi-year project; total funding over the five-year period will be higher, though the full project budget is not stated in the award record.
The research targets a question with direct relevance to Alzheimer's drug development: how tauopathy, the misfolding and aggregation of tau protein in neurons, manifests at the cellular level in an aged primate brain, and what measurable biomarkers accompany that damage. Non-human primates are considered a particularly informative model for this work because aged macaques develop Alzheimer's-like pathology that closely parallels human disease progression, as documented in peer-reviewed literature including a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and a 2018 paper in Alzheimer's & Dementia.
The funding comes from the National Institute on Aging, which was established Oct. 7, 1974, under Public Law 93-296 and serves as the lead federal agency for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias research. NIA has funded a national network of Alzheimer's Disease Centers since 1984.
Sources
Every factual claim in this article traces to one of the sources below. See how we work for the editorial process.
- reporter.nih.gov retrieved 04/05/2026 05:01
- nih.gov retrieved 04/05/2026 05:01
- pnas.org retrieved 04/05/2026 05:01
- sciencedirect.com retrieved 04/05/2026 05:01
Authored by The Scottsdale Signal. Drafted by AI from primary-source material under our beat-specific editorial guides; reviewed by humans before publish under our five-gate process. Sources retrieved at 04/05/2026 05:01. Every claim traces to a source.
