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[Title card animation: Dementia Australia Research Foundation - Diagnose]
[Dr Grace Lidgerwood, The University of Melbourne]
Dr Grace: I am Dr Grace Lidgerwood, a research fellow here in the University of Melbourne, Department of Anatomy and Physiology. Alzheimer's disease is a condition that affects a large number of our ageing population in Australia and internationally. It's a disease that's characterised by cognitive decline - so a decline in your ability to remember, to do basic functions. It's characterised by an accumulation of two proteins that cause toxic effects in the brain. One of these is called beta amyloid, and they cause plaques that accumulate around the brain cells. And the other one is called tau, which phosphorylates and causes sticky deposits to accumulate around the brain cells called neurons. They are two markers that basically are associated with the disease, and that we know cause the neurons to die in the brain, and this is what leads to the cognitive decline that patients develop over time.
What's really interesting from a lot of the clinical data that we're gathering now from routine eye tests, and from post-mortem analysis of patients that have sadly passed from the disease, is that there's also this accumulation of these toxic plaques and tau deposits in the eyes of patients with the disease. And I guess that's not really surprising because the eye is actually a part of the central nervous system, so it's physically attached to the brain. It contains neurons that are responsible for receiving light signals, and converting those into electrochemical signals, and then passing that back to the brain. So, the eye and the brain are basically one and the same.
One of the major challenges in diagnosing Alzheimer's disease is the accessibility to the brain, but the beauty of the eye being connected to the brain and being part of the central nervous system is that it's so available, and the health of your eye can really indicate the health of your brain. So, if we're able to study and look at patient's eye health, in particular the retina, which is the cells that contain all of the neurons that connect to the brain. If we can look at these cells and understand what's going wrong with them in Alzheimer's disease, in an eye, it might be a window into the health of the brain of these patients.
So, given that there is a link between the retina in Alzheimer's disease and the brain, this really fuelled my interest in studying this further. And so, my work is focused on is actually creating stem cell derived models from patients with disease, creating models of the retina in a dish in the lab, and then using these models to understand what goes wrong in disease. Stem cells are cells that are able to become any cell type of the human body. For this project, we're interested in converting those stem cells from those patients into retinal cells, or a self-organising mini retina called a retinal organoid. And then looking at whether we can detect the disease features in these patient-derived mini retinas, and compare them to healthy controls to see whether we can detect disease features in a dish.
When I found out I was the recipient of the Norma Beaconsfield Dementia Australia Research Foundation Project Grant, I was absolutely thrilled because it enabled me to really kickstart this really exciting project into a novel area of research. It's hoped that the outcome of this study will enable us to understand some of the molecular events that lead to these plaques forming in the neurons and causing death - so understanding what causes the disease, but also importantly, it might pave the way for clinical testing, so a routine eye testing being used as a complimentary model for diagnostics for Alzheimer's disease.
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This research is supported by:
Dementia Australia Research Foundation - Norma Beaconsfield Project Grant
The University of Melbourne
Dr Lidgerwood would like to acknowledge:
DHB Foundation
We thank Norma Beaconsfield for her support.
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Dementia Australia Research Foundation:
A cure is just the beginning
If you would like to see dementia research make real impact, donate today:
1300 636 679
www.dementia.org.au/donate-research
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