The University of Pittsburgh and its research partners will receive $4.9 million from Pennsylvania's share of national tobacco settlement money to develop ways of identifying and treating dementia and, in particular, Alzheimer's disease.

The grant was one of five totaling about $20 million announced this week by Gov. Ed Rendell and Health Secretary Dr. Calvin Johnson. The bulk of the money -- $13.4 million -- will go to establish centers of excellence in neurodegenerative diseases, with the remainder used for research into reducing tobacco use.

Dr. Steven DeKosky, director of Pitt's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, said the $4.9 million grant will be used in part to identify new medications that might inhibit enzyme and protein changes associated with Alzheimer's and to develop live-cell tests to assess whether the drugs work.

It also will fund neuroimaging studies using Pittsburgh Compound B, an experimental contrast agent that allows brain plaques associated with Alzheimer's to be viewed with positron emission tomography, or PET, scans. DeKosky said plans call for imaging people with atypical dementias -- people whose dementias appear to be a hybrid of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia -- in hopes of determining whether Alzheimer's is indeed involved.

The research also involves colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University, Penn State University and the local biotech firm Cellumen Inc.

The grant also will fund screening for people with potential cognitive problems, using a new test developed with Psychology Software Tools Inc. that employs portable computers known as Tablet PCs. The researchers will work with the Southwestern Pennsylvania Area Agency on Aging to screen people in rural areas and in under-served urban areas.

Research groups headed by Thomas Jefferson University and the University of Pennsylvania will receive grants of $3.5 million and $5 million, respectively, for dementia-related research.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia will receive $5 million to compare behavioral therapies for reducing smoking in adolescents -- work that will be done in collaboration with Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and other institutions. And $1.6 million will go to Penn, along with researchers at Pitt and other institutions, to test a medication for treating tobacco dependence in high-risk populations.