Our recent findings [33] show that blood transcript levels of SMAD3, a pericytic molecule that is perturbed in AD brains and essential in BBB function, also associate with neuroimaging phenotypes of amyloid PET and brain cortical thickness, provide proof of principle support for the significant potential of combined multi-omics and deep phenotypic data in discovering novel AD biomarkers. Here, SMAD3 is linked to Alzheimer disease.