Seattle Alzheimer's Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD)
The Seattle Alzheimer's Disease Brain Cell Atlas (SEA-AD) is an open, multimodal brain atlas that maps how Alzheimer's disease affects specific cell types in the human brain. Led by the Allen Institute for Brain Science in partnership with the University of Washington Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, SEA-AD is funded by the National Institute on Aging (NIA).
Despite decades of research, treatments aimed at reducing amyloid and tau pathology have produced only modest clinical benefit, in part because researchers have lacked a detailed reference for how the brain's individual cell types are disrupted as disease progresses. SEA-AD addresses this gap by building a cellular-level reference that other researchers can compare their own data against.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Does SEA-AD Connect to the AD Data Initiative?
SEA-AD is a program partner within the broader Alzheimer's and related dementias (ADRD) data ecosystem that the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative works to connect. Beyond producing its own data, SEA-AD's Integrative Analysis Center re-processes and harmonizes single-cell datasets from other large-scale Alzheimer's disease studies, mapping them to a shared cell classification so findings can be replicated and compared across the wider ADRD research community.
This harmonization work reflects the same interoperability goal that AD Workbench, the AD Data Initiative's secure, cloud-based research environment for neurodegenerative disease data sharing and analysis, is built to support. AD Workbench helps researchers search and combine data across exactly these kinds of contributing platforms, so a researcher evaluating SEA-AD alongside other ADRD datasets can do so from a single environment rather than navigating each source separately.
Who Leads SEA-AD, and What Role Does the Allen Institute Play?
The Allen Institute for Brain Science leads SEA-AD, applying next-generation single-cell molecular profiling technology it developed through the NIH BRAIN Initiative to a disease-specific question rather than only mapping the healthy brain. The University of Washington Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute's Adult Changes in Thought Study contribute the donor cohort, clinical phenotyping, and neuropathology infrastructure that ground the atlas in real patient histories.
What Does a Brain Atlas Like SEA-AD Contain?
A brain atlas of this kind combines multiple layers of data from the same donor brains, allowing researchers to connect what is happening molecularly, where it is happening anatomically, and when it occurs across disease progression. SEA-AD draws its cohort from the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) Study and the University of Washington Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, spanning the full spectrum of Alzheimer's pathology from no pathology to advanced disease. For each donor, the atlas integrates neuropathology imaging, single-nucleus RNA sequencing and epigenomics, and spatial transcriptomics. Data collection has focused on two brain regions implicated in the early progression of Alzheimer's pathology.
- SEA-AD at a Glance:
- 89 donors spanning the full spectrum of Alzheimer's pathology, from no pathology to advanced disease
- More than 1.4 million individual cell profiles
- Single-nucleus RNA sequencing, epigenomics, spatial transcriptomics, and neuropathology imaging
- Middle temporal gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex profiled to date
What Has SEA-AD Found So Far?
Early analysis of the SEA-AD dataset identified a subset of somatostatin-positive inhibitory interneurons that show vulnerability at the earliest, lowest levels of disease severity; preceding the loss of excitatory neurons typically associated with later-stage pathology. Findings like this illustrate why cell-level resolution matters: the same brain region can contain cell populations that respond to disease at very different points along its course, detail that is lost in bulk tissue analysis.