It started for historical reasons-our initial funder was a Huntington’s disease research group that hoped that if it rolled up all of the research out there, it could move the discovery process along and help a drug company to find a cure. But over time, neuroscience proved to be an ideal focus. There are a lot of “orphan” diseases in the field of neurology: They’re devastating, but because they affect a limited number of people, they generally aren’t financially worthwhile for pharmaceutical companies to take on. But there’s really a lot of shared research between these diseases. Alzheimer’s, ALS,
Huntington’s, autism, Parkinson’s, for instance, are all diseases of the brain, with lots of the same cells and systems under investigation, and when you bring them together you dramatically increase the pool of data and materials across the board.
Feb 28