Understanding the Role of Brain Immune Cells in Protection Against Alzheimer’s

Our goal is to learn about naturally available ways the brain fights against Alzheimer’s disease to help the development of more efficient therapeutics.

Understanding how Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is formed is challenging due to the complex, multifaceted nature of the disease. It is known now that the heritability of AD is over 60%. So, understanding the disease mechanism can be achieved by exploring these hereditary elements in patients vs. healthy individuals. Of note, some rare hereditary factors turn out to be protective and can provide protection against AD. Taking advantage of novel, multi-faceted stem cell models, we will study ApoE3 Christchurch as one of these rare, resilient factors, with a specific focus on brain-resident immune cells.

Taking advantage of human stem cell techniques, we use a novel state-of-the-art model that enables studying biology of human brain resident immune cells. Moreover, we have recently made advancements in enhancing our model to better recapitulate all aspects of Alzheimer’s disease. This research may help explain why some people with high levels of Alzheimer’s disease toxic proteins stay healthier than others.

Our proposed experiments will help reveal mechanisms of protective paths that the brain immune cells take. This information will provide valuable new insight that could inform the development of promising new therapeutic approaches.