A researcher from NIHR Queen’s Square Dementia Biomedical Research Unit is to investigate biological changes that occur in nerve cells prior to their demise as a way to help develop treatments for dementia.
Dr Selina Wray, based in UCL’s Department of Molecular Neuroscience, aims to develop cell models that can be used in the laboratory to study the changes in cells that lead to cell death.
This is particularly challenging for diseases affecting the brain, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, because human brain cells are difficult to grow in the laboratory and the only resource of human brain cells is through post-mortem brain tissue, which is always at the end stage of disease.
Dr Wray said: “Stem cells possess the unique property that they can be converted into any cell type. We are using stem cells from patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and converting them to neurons so we have a human neuronal model of Alzheimer’s Disease we can study in the laboratory”.
The particular focus for the research is tau – a protein which builds up in the brain. If tau tangles it becomes a feature of Alzheimer's Disease and, in some cases, of fronto-temporal dementia.
Studies of post-mortem brain tissue have shown that the appearance and amount of tau tangles in the brain correlates with the severity of disease, the more tau tangles are in the brain the more severe symptoms a patient will have. Dr Wray said: “These studies suggest that reducing the amount of tau tangles would be a good treatment for disease. Our cell model will allow us to understand the earliest changes that happen when tangles form, so that we can try to design strategies to stop this.”
Another feature of Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia is that neurons in the brain stop communicating with each other effectively. In collaboration with colleagues in Strathclyde, the neurons generated by Dr Wray will be grown in special chambers, known as microfluidics devices, to understand neuronal connectivity. Dr Wray said: “Growing cells in microfluidics chambers will allow us to study how the neurons connect with one another and if this connectivity is affected in cells with abnormal tau”.
