U of L professor working on new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease

The research being done is being boosted by a grant of nearly $1 million over three years from the Weston Brain Institute, a non-profit institute of the W. Garfield Weston Foundation.

The foundation supports world-class neuroscience research to accelerate discovery of treatments for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In a release from the U of L, Mohajerani said new treatments for those types of diseases are critical.

“Alzheimer’s disease has an enormous impact on patients, the health-care system and society. This is only anticipated to get worse as the population ages. Current treatments for Alzheimer’s disease only address some of the symptoms. They do not prevent or alter the course of the disease,” he stated.

Mohajerani is working alongside Drs. Benoit Gosselin and Yves De Koninck.

They’ll develop a device that allows for minimally invasive stimulation and recording of brain activity in mice in their home cages.

The device features a wireless transmitter, which removes the need for the animal to be taken from its home cage and hooked up to wires in the lab.

The implant will be combined with an automated monitoring system. That’s currently under development at the CCBN and records the animals’ natural behaviour.

The devices, working together, will allow scientists to measure both the brain activity and behaviour of an animal in its home environment over days, weeks and even months.

The technology will allow them to address the idea that abnormal brain activity, characterized by an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory connections in the brain, underlies the early progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

An increase or decrease of a protein found on the outer membranes of cells within the nervous system, called potassium chloride co-transporter 2 (KCC2), affects the balance of inhibitory and excitatory activity in the brain.

Pharmaceutical tools that target KCC2 could be able to correct imbalances observed in Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other nervous system illnesses like chronic pain.

“We are using drugs that modulate the expression of KCC2,” Mohajerani said.

“We will increase and also decrease the production of KCC2 to study both effects. We will explore if activation of KCC2, by boosting neuronal inhibition, can reduce the progression of the disease and if inhibition of KCC2 will increase the progression of the disease.”

With the use of modified mice that model Alzheimer’s disease pathology and symptoms, the project will aim to accelerate the development of therapeutics for Alzheimer’s by testing how altering KCC2 function affects brain activity and behaviour during disease progression in living animals.

If the project is a success, it would implicate KCC2 as an entirely new drug target for mitigating Alzheimer’s disease.

by Justin Goulet

U of L professor working on new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease

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