Lost connections: Unravelling the mysteries of brain disease

We are at a crucial moment in Alzheimer’s Disease research. As therapies are developed to slow the underlying causes of the disease, other treatments, such as those targeting synapses, aim to address the symptoms of the disease. Synapses are small connections where two brain cells meet and communicate, and their loss is associated with disease symptoms. We investigate what happens to synapses during Alzheimer’s Disease in human post mortem tissue in order to develop and test drugs to alleviate disease symptoms.

How do we know what cell types cause a brain disease? The conventional approach has been to look at the pathology seen after death, and see which cells are lost. However, there is no reason to believe that the cells which are lost are the ones that caused the disease in the first place: their disapearance might be a symptom rather than a cause. An alternative approach is to use genetic data, and find the cell types associated with specific regions of the genetic code of the disease. In this talk we’ll consider what we can learn from doing this, and what some of the pitfalls are in evaluating whether the associations found imply causality.