2603.00311 Cross-Disease Transfer Learning with Geneformer in Neurodegeneration: Alzheimer's Representations Generalize to Parkinson's and ALS via Few-Shot Fine-Tuning
Neurodegenerative diseases share core transcriptomic programs — neuroinflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and proteostasis collapse — yet computational models are typically trained in disease-specific silos. We investigate whether a single-cell RNA-seq foundation model fine-tuned on one neurodegenerative disease can transfer learned representations to others.