Genetic Consortium in LATAM: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

MORELLI L

Conferencia; 3rd Annual Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) Conference; 2018

Alzheimer's disease(AD) is a major challenge for modern medicine. Currently, early diagnosticmethods or specific treatments are not available. To offer solutions to this situationit is necessary new knowledge to identify useful targets to treat thepathology. In the last two decades important scientific advances were made inthat direction and useful animal models were generated to understand whatcauses the disease. However, these models are limited and insufficient todevelop early diagnostic methods and/or treatments that may be effective forhumans. Translational medicine opens a new possibility to experimentallyaddress the study of AD and identify new predictive markers and therapeutictargets for humans. To achieve this goal close coordination efforts between theresearch institutes and the health care centers are required. In Latin America countriesdo not exist and adequate coordination in that sense. Recent efforts were implementedin Argentina to cover that space by the organization of a Translational MedicineProgram for Research, Diagnoses and Treatment of AD in Public Institutions (FS-BIOPBIT 0009/2013) through the support of National Ministry of Science, Technologyand Innovation. In this context, among different activities we developed anetwork-based collaboration for genetic studies of AD in Argentina. Subjects arebeing recruited from the outpatient Neurology Departments of 7 medical centers spreadalong the country including City of Buenos Aires and Provinces of Buenos Aires,Córdoba, Jujuy and Mendoza. Strengths (characteristic of the population, lackof case-control genetic studies, endorsements of ethical committees to advance intranslational research), weaknesses (lack of financial resources, untrainedhuman resources for multidisciplinary work, incompatibility of routine work ofthe MDs with a basic research protocol), opportunities (relevance of theinclusion of poorly represented populations in world genetic studies), andthreats (expand the collaborative network including as many centers as possible)will be discussed.