For decades, researchers across institutions have peered into microscopes and dived into data to try to understand how diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) affect the brain. While scientists have made many important insights into these conditions, breakthrough therapies to cure or even treat them remain out of reach.

To expedite understanding of and treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, the Allen Institute launched the Brain Health accelerator. The project, announced today, is a global initiative that will leverage cutting-edge technology with the goal of improving modeling, therapeutic development, and the understanding of disease mechanisms. With funding support from the Allen Institute, the Bezos family, Amazon Web Services, the National Institutes of Health, EverythingALS, and other partners, the project financial contribution is $400 million.

One of the challenges in studying diseases in the human brain and identifying treatment strategies has been the scale and complexity of the organ. The brain consists of many distinct parts, and studying disease mechanisms requires samples from large numbers of individuals. Additionally, while technological advancements in transcriptomics, proteomics, neuroimaging, and AI have helped researchers study the brain in finer detail, researchers have not always integrated many of these approaches into the same project.