East Hampton, NY - January 6th, 2014 - On Sunday, January 12th from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. the Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center will present What You Need to Know About Alzheimer’s at the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, located at 44 Woods Lane in East Hampton, NY. Ms. Malack-Ragona will provide important information for families who are coping with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias.

Ms. Ragona will be joined by Andrew Sproul, PhD who is a Staff Scientist at the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute. NYSCF and Dr. Sproul are doing groundbreaking work on the disease. The Alzheimer’s research at NYSCF focuses on generating and using patient-specific induced pluripotent stem cells, which are generated from skin samples, and then turning them into neural cells to study Alzheimer’s Disease. Making the actual cells affected in Alzheimer’s Disease gives scientists a window into the disease and allows them to watch the disease progress and develop in the Petri dish. This exciting new approach has opened up new avenues of research, including the ability to better understand Alzheimer’s Disease, as well as test large numbers of therapeutic drugs on cells affected by disease to find new treatments.

The NYSCF Research Institute’s Alzheimer’s team collaborates extensively with other Alzheimer’s clinicians and researchers around the world. The NYSCF Research Institute also recently entered into a partnership with Personalgenomes.org to identify genetic and environmental contributions to disease development. Personalgenomes.org is an organization that invites participants to share their medical data for the greater good and is the only open access source of human genome, microbiome, and disease data in the world.

NYSCF scientists will generate stem cell lines to complement genomic data and medical histories provided by patients, creating a unique and powerful public resource to help researchers identify the causes of disease, including Alzheimer’s Disease.

Today there are approximately 5.3 million people in this country with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease and by 2050 that number is expected to triple. “The work being done at the New York Stem Cell Foundation is critical to finding a cure for this devastating disease,” says Ms. Ragona.

The Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center, which is headquartered in Bay Shore and has a satellite office in Southampton, is the only local Alzheimer’s Disease advocacy and educational facility whose mission is to support local research to find a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease and to provide hands-on support and services to families on Long Island and the Greater New York metropolitan area. ADRC works with family members, health care professionals and researchers to ensure quality health care and support to those impacted by dementia/Alzheimer’s Disease through care and consultation, information and referral, training, support groups, and caregiver safety products.

For more information about this upcoming presentation, please call M.A. Malack-Ragona at (631) 820-8068.