HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - HudsonAlpha recently received an anonymous donation of 2.5 million dollars to support the institute's memory and mobility fund.
The project will focus on research of neurodegenerative diseases like, Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease and ALS.
"We couldn't have done it without the 2.5, but certainly that put us over the top and we're able to get started now," said postdoctoral fellow, Nick Cochran.
After the anonymous donation, the fundraising efforts for the memory and mobility fund are close to complete.
"The research we're doing is really all about identifying new causes for Alzheimer disease, or undiscovered causes rather," said Cochran.
Specifically diseases that are running in families, but haven't been identified before. The next step, HudsonAlpha will wait until they receive test samples from collaborators in California.
From there, they can determine if the disease is being passed genetically, and all of this wouldn't be possible without the grants HudsonAlpha receives for research.
"The philanthropy is a critical piece of that," said Cochran. "Especially for these big sequencing projects. A lot of times it's too big for a government agency to fund or a foundation.
Cochran says, even the small donations make a big difference.
If it only directly helps a small population, it's one step closer to a bigger, end goal.