PHILADELPHIA – As the search for successful Alzheimer's disease drugs remains elusive, experts believe that identifying biomarkers -- early biological signs of the disease -- could be key to solving the treatment conundrum. However, the rapid collection of data from tens of thousands of Alzheimer's patients far exceeds the scientific community's ability to make sense of it. Now, with a $17.8 million grant from the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health, researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania will collaborate with 11 research centers to determine more precise diagnostic biomarkers and drug targets for the disease, which affects nearly 50 million people worldwide. For the project, the teams will apply advanced artificial intelligence (AI) methods to integrate and find patterns in genetic, imaging, and clinical data from over 60,000 Alzheimer's patients -- representing one of the largest and most ambitious research undertakings of its kind. Penn Medicine's Christos Davatzikos, PhD, a professor of Radiology and director of the Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics, and Li Shen, PhD, a professor of Informatics, will serve as two of five co-principal investigators on the five-year project.