Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

James Lah

Cajoling brain cells to dance

“Flicker” treatment is a striking non-pharmaceutical approach aimed at slowing or reversing Alzheimer’s disease. It represents a reversal of EEG: not only recording brain waves, but reaching into the brain and cajoling cells to dance. One neuroscientist commentator called the process “almost too fantastic to believe.”

With flashing lights and buzzing sounds, researchers think they can get immune cells in the brain to gobble up more amyloid plaques, the characteristic clumps of protein seen in Alzheimer’s. In mouse models, it appears to work, and Emory and Georgia Tech investigators recently reported the results of the first human feasibility study of the flicker treatment in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

“So far, this is very preliminary, and we’re nowhere close to drawing conclusions about the clinical benefit of this treatment,” said neurologist James Lah, who supervised the Flicker study at Emory Brain Health Center. “But we now have some very good arguments for a larger, longer study with more people.”

The good news: most participants in the study could tolerate the lights and sounds, and almost all stuck with the eight-week regimen of experimental treatment. (Some even joined an optional extension.) In addition, researchers observed that brain cells were dancing to the tunes they piped in, at least in the short term, and saw signs of a reduction in markers of inflammation. Whether the approach can have a long-term effect on neurodegeneration in humans is still to be determined.

Annabelle Singer, who helped develop the flicker technique at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says researchers are still figuring out the optimal ways to use it. Recent studies have been assessing how long and how often people should experience the lights and sounds, and more are underway.

“We need to collect all the information we have about how to measure someone’s progress,” says Singer, who is now an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

In the feasibility study, ten people diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment used goggles and headphones that provided light/sound stimulation at home for an hour every day. This video from Georgia Public Broadcasting’s Your Fantastic Mind series demonstrates what that was like.

“To me — It’s not painfully loud. And the lights are not as bright as you would think they are… I don’t find them to be annoying,” says retired psychotherapist Jackie Spierman in the video.

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Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

A structure for SorLA/LR11

The importance of the SorLA or LR11 receptor in braking Alzheimer’s was originally defined here at Emory by Jim Lah and Allan Levey’s labs. Japanese researchers recently determined the structure of SorLA and published the results in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Their findings point toward a direct role for SorLA in binding toxic circulating beta-amyloid and transporting it to the lysosome for degradation. Hat tip to Alzforum.

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

Alzheimer’s drug discovery: looking under the right ROCK

Developing drugs that can change the progression of Alzheimer’s disease is a huge challenge. In the last few years, more than one pharmaceutical firm have abandoned clinical programs in Alzheimer’s that once looked promising. Still, Emory and Scripps scientists have found an approach that deserves a second look and more investigation.

One straightforward drug strategy against Alzheimer’s is to turn down the brain’s production of beta-amyloid, the key component of the disease’s characteristic plaques. A toxic fragment of a protein found in healthy brains, beta-amyloid accumulates in the brains of people affected by the disease.

The enzyme that determines how much beta-amyloid brain cells generate is called BACE (beta-secretase or beta-site APP cleaving enzyme). Yet finding drugs that inhibit that elusive enzyme has been far from straightforward.

Now researchers  have identified a way to shut down production of beta-amyloid by diverting BACE to a different part of the cell and inhibiting its activity. The results were published this week in Journal of Neuroscience. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment