The 2026 awards position Center for BrainHealth researchers to compete for multimillion-dollar state grants from the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT) to accelerate and scale translational research over the coming decade. In addition to emerging scientists, this year included awards to principal investigators.

AI can predict the structures of many proteins, but it still struggles with a large class of proteins that do not hold one fixed shape and are heavily implicated in neurodegenerative disease.

A new $28.6 million ARPA-H-funded effort aims to close that gap. Randal Halfmann, Ph.D., and his lab at the Stowers Institute will generate more than 10 billion measurements of protein aggregation across 50,000 proteins using DAmFRET, creating one of the large experimental datasets needed to train AI models on when and how these proteins go wrong.

The work could help researchers move from observing harmful protein aggregation after it happens to predicting it earlier, with implications for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, ALS, Huntington’s and related diseases.

A multidisciplinary care model developed across Sutter Health helped general neurologists address a practical challenge facing health systems nationwide: how to safely offer newer Alzheimer’s disease treatments in community settings to more patients. The results of their discoveries were published today in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.

New research from the Bogalusa Heart Study has found that greater exposure to clinical obesity during young adulthood is associated with a greater burden of white matter changes in the brain by midlife, providing new insight into how metabolic health across the lifespan may influence brain health. The study used the clinical obesity framework developed by the Lancet Commission on the Definition and Diagnosis of Clinical Obesity to examine the relationship between obesity and brain health. LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center’s Dr. Owen Carmichael is part of the Bogalusa Heart Study research team.