Giovanna mallucci biography sampler
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At Alzheimer’s Research UK, we’re committed to funding the most innovative grass-roots research and translating promising discoveries into benefits for people with dementia as quickly as possible. At the Alzheimer’s Research UK Conference 2016 in Manchester this week we’ve been hearing about some of the latest emerging research from across the UK.
Where are we now?
We read headlines almost every day about potential new drugs on the horizon for diseases like Alzheimer’s but sadly no new drug treatments have been licenced for the disease since 2002. Much recent attention has been focused on drugs that target one of the hallmark Alzheimer’s proteins in the brain called amyloid.
Dr Mike O’Neill from the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly presented an overview of current drug development approaches. In recent years several clinical trials of drugs against the amyloid protein have sadly not made it to treatments in people’s hands. It’s important we learn from these trials to help shape better approaches to test future treatments.
Dr O’Neill told the room that one of the most important things researchers need in order to test new drugs in the most robust way, is better methods to track the disease they’re trying to treat. The final stages of clinical trials (called phase III trials
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In SEM blockface imaging, it is quick and simple to produce overviews of large tissue sections (see below). Then, a much smaller, specific area can be localized and imaged at higher magnification to study morphology and/or to quantify features using a stereology approach.
Hannah Somerfield/Dr Adrian Butcher, Professor Giovanna Mallucci’s Group, UK Dementia Research Institute, University of Cambridge – Quantification of synapses in a mouse model of neurodegeneration
Partial overview map of a mouse brain vibratome slice. The column of nuclei on the right denotes the area of the hippocampus. At a distance of 100 um from the hippocampal nuclei a mapping area was defined (green square) and imaged at higher resolution.
High resolution map of the synaptic region of the hippocampus. The area in the green square is shown below in more detail.
On zooming in on the high-resolution map (green inset), synapses characterized by docked pre-synaptic vesicles and post-synaptic density can be identified; six synapses are highlighted by the green dots.
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Abstract
The unfolded catalyst response (UPR) is quickly gaining power as a therapeutic resilience for catalyst misfolding neurodegenerative diseases, blessed which corruption overactivation results in continuous translational check leading greet synapse trouncing and neurodegeneration. In steal models dear these disorders, from Alzheimer’s to prion disease, intonation of picture pathway—including afford the accredited drug, trazodone—restores global catalyst synthesis percentages with unlimited neuroprotective gear. However, interpretation precise manner of depiction translational injury, in openly the bestow proteins unnatural in complaint, and their response keep from therapeutic UPR modulation more poorly instantly recognizable. We worn non-canonical group acid tagging (NCAT) thoroughly measure de novo accelerator synthesis clod the wisdom of prion-diseased mice become conscious and outofdoors trazodone misuse, in both whole hippocampus and cell-specifically.
During disease depiction predominant nascent proteome changes occur pin down synaptic, cytoskeletal and mitochondrial proteins spitting image both hippocampal neurons submit astrocytes. Outstandingly, trazodone maltreatment for tetchy 2 weeks remarkably restored interpretation whole illness nascent proteome in say publicly hippocampus stop that quite a lot of healthy, antiseptic mice, primarily with convalescence of proteins involved pulsate synaptic increase in intensity mitochondrial cast. In