URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2018_Melissa-McCarthy

William Van Nostrand Herrmann Professor of Neuroscience George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience Biomedical & Pharmaceutical Sciences

“We’re getting better and better at getting earlier into the process. I’m feeling optimistic that the treatments that have already been tried will be more successful with the earlier identification of the disease.”

- William Van Nostrand

“Alzheimer’s starts decades before you begin seeing clinical signs of it,” Van Nostrand says. “There’s probably a 30-year window of development of the disease. Amyloid accumulates over those decades, and then gets to a tipping point where enough damage occurs in the brain that you then see the clinical signs. “The problem is that once you identify patients with Alzheimer’s, there’s so much damage that has occurred to the brain that to intervene is like throwing a bucket of water on a forest fire,” he adds. “The challenge now is to identify individuals developing the disease when they are younger so interventions can have a more meaningful impact on the process and prevent further progression. But how do you identify people 20 years before they have symptoms?”

associated with the disease. Van Nostrand is trying to understand why the amyloids accumulate in the blood vessels and what they do that is so detrimental to the brain. “We’re studying it at a very basic level in a test tube to learn how the proteins interact together,” he explains. “We also use brain blood vessel cells we grow in the lab to see what happens when we add amyloids. We also have experimental model systems we developed in our own laboratories. It’s all to understand how the Alzheimer’s process happens and to test ways to block it from happening.” Alzheimer’s disease is a tremendously difficult disease to cure because it develops extremely slowly throughout a long period of time.

Spring | 2018 Page 9