South Korea and the United States have agreed to launch a joint study on dementia.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health will invest a record eight-point-five million dollars into the research.
Park Se-young has more.
The National Research Center for Dementia has an average brain map of Koreans.
To find genes that cause dementia, U.S. researchers are going to decrypt the more than four-thousand Korean genomes secured by the research center.

"It's very clear. If you want to understand the basis of the disease in Koreans, you have to study Koreans, not just study people from the United States and Europe."

The U.S. National Institutes of Health will invest nearly eight-point-five million dollars over five years for joint research on dementia with Korea, …the first foreign investment of over 500-thousand dollars by the agency.
Korea will carry out the largest disease genome analysis project in the country so far.

"This will be Korea's first whole genome sequencing related to a major disease. This means we'll be able to secure the technical platform for analyzing even tiny changes made to dementia-causing genes."

The Korean research center has biomedical big data from more than ten-thousand people aged 60 and above.
The genome analysis project is expected to lay the foundation for personalized treatment of dementia …based on individual genetic factors.
Park Se-young, Arirang News.