Data flow, privacy and access

The consortium is building a fully anonymized Harmonized Data Set (HDS) that will grow annually. We are utilizing the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative) data-sharing platform and secure workspace environments. Our data flow employs rigorous privacy and safety standards at each step.

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Data uploaded to the AD Workbench

Each GNPC contributor creates a private, individual workspace on the AD Data Initiative’s research platform, the AD Workbench. This workspace allows users to perform custom analyses using AD Data Initiative’s secure, cloud-based resources and easily share data with the consortium for inclusion in the HDS. 

Data harmonized and anonymized

Professional data vendors will harmonize and anonymize the data to international standards using approved and certified methods (e.g., TrialAssure Software).

HDS early access for consortium members

Data contributors will have one year to internally review and report on summary findings with each version of the HDS. The V1 HDS was made available to consortium members in March 2024.

HDS released to the broader research community

After one year of intra-consortium analysis, V1 of the HDS will be accessible by the broader research community as a shared, global resource via the AD Data Initiative’s data platform, the AD Workbench (for approved use/users). The V1 HDS will be publicly available in March 2025.


Workstreams and analysis

Our preliminary research efforts include understanding the role of inflammation, preexisting genetic risk factors and the identification of combinatorial gene-protein signatures that are indicative of disease type or progression. These multiple parallel analysis workstreams include longitudinal profiling, cross-sectional profiling, proteogenomic analysis and multivariate prediction. Within each workstream, consortium members may pursue any number of specific projects and collaborate with each other to combine expertise.



The size and diversity of the HDS allows for each research question raised within a workstream to be applied broadly across the field of neurodegenerative disorders or to a specific disease area.

The HDS includes over 40,000 samples for diseases that include Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

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Accessible Data

The flexibility of AD Data Initiative’s AD Workbench allows for multiple simultaneous projects to be run on the HDS by teams across the world.

Pre-accessible data

Many of the individual cohorts that comprise the HDS are already available for qualified researchers to access:


Guidelines and growth

The GNPC Steering Committee will set community access guidelines for dataset access requests and publication standards. The committee comprises one member from each research group.

The GNPC is intended for continual annual growth. Future cycles and updated versions of the HDS may include additional diverse sets of data and a greater variety of biomarkers for comparative analysis.

Additional resources


Contact Us

Please contact info@neuroproteome.org with inquiries about joining the Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium (GNPC) or questions about accessing the resulting data.