Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most common form of senile dementia without effective treatments after a countless number of clinical trials for many decades. Previous efforts to understand the mechanisms of the development of the pathology in AD revealed that innate immune cells called microglia play a critical role in ...
February 14, 2022
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology comprises the accumulation of incorrectly folded proteins accompanied by oxidative stress and sustained inflammation that result in a neurodegenerative disease. This pathological process develops in the brain starting approximately 20 years before the appearance of symptomatic dementia. These years should be regarded as an incubation period ...
February 23, 2023
2023 Previous findings from our lab identified amyloid beta as an antimicrobial peptide. We demonstrated that amyloid beta was capable of protecting cells, worms and mice against infections from bacteria, yeast and viruses. In the first year of this study, we have greatly expanded on our previous research. Examining tau, the ...
February 11, 2022
2023 Why does Alzheimer’s disease (AD) risk increase with aging? Current AD therapy focuses on the removal of senile plaque amyloid that contains fibrils aggregated from the small protein amyloid beta peptide. Our new data show that brain levels of the small, soluble amyloid peptide increase in mice during normal aging, two ...
February 11, 2022
2019 Alzheimer’s disease and several other neurodegenerative diseases are associated with the accumulation in neurons of misfolded aggregation-prone proteins (e.g., tau and amyloid beta). Presently, no treatment is available to slow the steady accumulation of such toxic proteins. Such misfolded proteins in cells typically are selectively destroyed by the proteasome (the ...
April 28, 2016
Alzheimer’s disease and Type II diabetes long have been observed to have a clinical connection, with patients with diabetes more than twice as likely as those without the disease to develop Alzheimer’s. But the precise nature of this connection has been a mystery until recently. Over the last few years, ...
March 6, 2012
Featured Researcher: William Mobley, M.D., Ph.D. Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurosciences at University of California, San Diego; Executive Director of UCSD’s Down Syndrome Center for Research and Treatment; Florence Riford Chair for Alzheimer’s Disease Research. Born in landlocked Nebraska, William Mobley discovered the wonders of research when he ...
July 28, 2014
2019 Our goal of characterizing potential Alzheimer therapeutics is based on our success in identifying compounds from the original screening of drugs previously approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of other diseases. We will study the changes in pathological proteins that are affected by candidate Alzheimer’s ...
December 20, 2018
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) is a highly selective membrane barrier, formed by brain endothelial cells, that separates the brain from circulating blood, preventing harmful materials in the blood from entering the brain. BBB disruption occurs in various neurological disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), which is the most common form of dementia ...
August 9, 2018
Dr. Can (Martin) Zhang is an Associate Professor of Neurology and a faculty member of the McCance Center for Brain Health at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Harvard Medical School (HMS). Dr. Zhang received his M.D. and master’s degree at the Weifang Medical College, China and then his ...
March 7, 2023
