Identifying therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease with big data

Nilüfer Ertekin-Taner is a Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology at the Mayo Clinic, Jacksonville, FL, USA. A neurogeneticist and board-certified behavioral neurologist, she received her medical degree from Hacettepe University Medical School in Ankara, Turkey and her doctorate degree in Molecular Neuroscience from Mayo Graduate School. She completed her residency training in the Department of Neurology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester (MN, USA) and fellowship in Behavioral Neurology at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville. Her laboratory aims to discover and characterize genetic factors underlying the complex genetics of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related neurodegenerative conditions. Her earlier work contributed to the establishment of the endophenotype approach in genetic studies of AD and pioneered the use of amyloid β peptide levels as an endophenotype in AD genetic research. Her laboratory currently uses biological traits such as gene expression levels and cognitive scores and leverages combined genome, transcriptome and epigenetic data to uncover genetic risk factors for neurodegenerative conditions. She is the principal investigator of numerous NIH and foundation grants. She leads multiple collaborative projects aimed at gene and pathway discoveries in AD and other neurodegenerative diseases, as a part of the NIH initiatives Accelerating Medicines Partnership AD (AMP-AD) and Molecular Mechanisms of the Vascular Etiology of AD (M2OVE-AD) consortia. She is the Principal Investigator of the Florida Consortium for African-American AD Studies (FCA3DS). As a neurologist in the Memory Disorders Clinic at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, she continues to evaluate and manage patients with AD and other dementias and aspires to improve the quality of care that we provide to our patients and their families.