In the News

Autosomal Dominant Neurodegenerative Diseases (ADND) like Huntington’s disease and the rare form of inherited early onset Alzheimer’s disease are particularly challenging brain disorders, in part because they often begin at an early age. Sarah Hernandez, PhD Lindsay Hohsfield, PhD UCI MIND researchers, Drs. Sarah Hernandez (Thompson Lab) and Lindsay Hohsfield (Green Lab) recently published a perspective article in the Journal of Translational Medicine on the added scientific and ethical issues that should be considered when enrolling participants of child-bearing potential into ADND prevention clinical trials. To better understand their unique perspective on this topic read their paper > To learn…

UCI MIND’s Drs. Elizabeth Head and Joshua Grill and a core group of faculty members were recently awarded a prestigious National Institute on Aging T32 training grant to help recruit and prepare the next generation of predoctoral and postdoctoral scientists to study Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. The training grant will support several promising early stage scientists for a renewable one-year appointment, as they learn from UCI MIND’s renowned faculty.

Karen Zagorski of the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach presented data on a line of research conducted in collaboration with UCI MIND’s David Cribbs, Hayk Davtyan, and Matt Blurton-Jones.

UCI MIND Director, Joshua Grill, PhD spoke today as part of a panel on the impact of drug approval on future clinical trials at the AAIC Annual Conference in Denver, CO. Dr. Grill presented on the ethical considerations needed for designing studies in the presence of an approved drug like Aduhelm.  To learn more about this topic, read the recent paper he co-authored with Dr. Jason Karlawish in Neurology

UCI MIND researcher, Dr. Vivek Swarup is gaining significant attention for his work on glial cell gene expression in AD. His lab’s research, published in Nature Genetics 2 weeks ago was recently featured on the heavily trafficked Alzheimer’s research website, Alzforum.com – a testament to the impact his research has on the broader AD community. Dr. Swarup used prefrontal cortex brain tissue from UCI ADRC brain donors to examine differences in glial cell gene transcription between healthy and AD brains.   He found that the areas in the DNA above important AD risk genes, responsible for expressing those genes, were different…

Leslie Vazquez-Rangel, a fourth-year undergraduate at UCI was recently selected to participate in the prestigious Minority Access to Research Careers (MARC) Program, an NIH funded training grant that is awarded to only 640 students across the US each year. The program will allow a select few PhD-bound honors students like Leslie to engage in meaningful research under the guidance of world-renowned professors.  Leslie will spend the next year working with Dr. Elizabeth Head, a professor in the Department of Pathology to study the link between Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease. To learn more about Leslie and the incredible research being done in Dr. Head’s lab, visit https://sites.mind.uci.edu/headlab

Contributed by Hamsi Radhakrishnan Organ transplant recipients are significantly less likely to develop dementia compared to the general population; perhaps because the drugs they take to suppress their immune system to prevent donor organ rejection could also be curbing neuroinflammation. To assess whether these drugs could be repurposed as dementia-preventing medication in middle-aged adults, we studied the effects one year treatment with the FDA-approved immunosuppressant Tacrolimus had on the beagle brain. Using advanced diffusion MRI, we found that tacrolimus protected against aging-related microstructural changes that are often associated with cognitive decline, specifically in the hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex, prefrontal cortex and…

Bob and Marlene Lippman in their home. “Bob had a very strong intellect,” Ms. Lippman said. “It is hard that that part of him is being attacked.”Credit...Jackie Molloy for The New York Times The single most consistent barrier to progress in Alzheimer’s disease treatment development is low rates of participation in research. To learn about clinical trials at UCI MIND, visit https://www.mind.uci.edu/research-studies/participate/. To enroll in the C2C Registry and give researchers permission to let you know about new studies for which you might be eligible, visit c2c.uci.edu.

Contributed by Stefania Forner, PhD Most cases of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are late-onset and occur sporadically; however, the majority of AD animal models are based on rare genetic mutations, making them good models of the less common familial AD, which accounts for 1% of all cases. As treatments effective in these mouse models have proven ineffective in humans, there is a clear need to develop new models that better represent the more common, late-onset sporadic form of AD. With this in mind, my colleagues and I at UCI MIND used a different approach in a recent study published in Nature…