Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) has launched a new platform – the ASAP CRN Cloud – a data-sharing tool designed to advance Parkinson’s disease (PD) research by making data easily available to researchers worldwide
The platform contains data from a unique human postmortem-derived brain sequencing collection. These include samples from four ASAP Collaborative Research Network (CRN) teams and 156 donors, offering unprecedented insights into neurodegeneration.
The CRN Cloud brings resources from across ASAP’s network to a single platform, enabling researchers to share, access, and work directly with other leading experts to distill discoveries offering the potential for unprecedented insights into neurodegeneration.
The initial data originates from ASAP’s Collaborative Research Network, an international, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional network of scientists working to address high-priority basic science questions at the heart of PD.
“Human postmortem-derived brain samples and data are a precious resource that are highly limited for scientific research communities studying neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease,” said Sonya Dumanis, PhD, deputy director at Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP).
“By democratising and federating data in one place through the CRN Cloud, ASAP and our partners are building responsible, open access data and resources to amplify the impact of every contribution across the research community and allow researchers to develop faster and better outcomes.”
Brain samples
The launch collection of human postmortem derived brain samples contains single-cell transcriptomic data.
Single-cell transcriptomics allow each cell to be independently characterized and scrutinized for which genes are active or “expressed” in each cell type to better understand what goes wrong in neurodegeneration.
This approach has already provided critical insight in many diseases, including cancer, where the ability to study adjacent cancerous and healthy cells has provided new insights into how cells go awry, and how they can be detected or targeted. This approach is highly anticipated in the field of neuroscience, where the brain’s diverse cell types, complex structures and subtleties of pathology can only be observed after death.
ASAP developed the tool with implementation partner The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, along with technical partners at DataTecnica, DNAstack, and Verily.
Researchers who are interested in accessing the data should visit https://cloud.parkinsonsroadmap.org and submit a Data Use Application from within the platform. To submit an application, researchers need to provide their role, institution, and intended use of the data, as well as agree to the terms of the data use agreement. Once data access has been granted, researchers will have access to all data sets.
