Drs. Jeff Iliff and William Rooney selected as Allen Distinguished Investigators
July 14, 2015
Jeff Iliff, Ph.D. '10, assistant professor of anesthesiology and perioperative medicine in the OHSU School of Medicine, and William Rooney, Ph.D., associate professor of behavioral neuroscience in the OHSU School of Medicine, and senior scientist in the OHSU Brain Institute and Advanced Imaging Research Center, are one of five teams of researchers from around the world selected to receive Allen Distinguished Investigator grants for research in Alzheimer’s disease.
The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation grants seek to open new frontiers in science by supporting early-stage research that incorporates novel, creative and ambitious approaches with the potential to reinvent entire fields.
Dr. Iliff and Rooney's research team, awarded $1.4 million, will use novel methods combined with an established imaging approach to measure the activity of the glymphatic system for the first time in human patients.
If successful, this method may be able to provide insight into which patients are vulnerable to the build-up of plaques long before clinical symptoms arise.
This could provide a window of treatment opportunities when lifestyle interventions and drug treatments have the greatest opportunity of preventing or delaying Alzheimer’s disease.
Related reading
- View the media release
- Oregonian: OHSU team wins $1 million-plus for Alzheimer's research
- Q&A with Dr. Rooney
Pictured: Dr. Rooney (top), Dr. Iliff