Jereme Spiers

What is the focus of the research?

Investigating how tiny communication packets released from cells, called extracellular vesicles, cause inflammation to spread through the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.

Why is this important?

While researchers know that inflammation plays a key role in Alzheimer’s disease, they still don’t fully understand how it drives damage to the brain. Most treatments have failed because they target the disease too late or miss key mechanisms.

Dr Spiers is aiming to understand how inflammation alters the proteins carried by extracellular vesicles, which play an important part in how cells communicate with each other. He hopes to uncover how this alternation spreads harmful proteins between cells in Alzheimer’s disease. 

Using donated human brain tissue and patient-derived stem cells, the team will closely examine thousands of proteins to uncover hidden inflammatory signals. By uncovering how inflammatory signals are passed between cells at a very early stage, Dr Spiers will tackle a major gap in our understanding of how Alzheimer’s disease develops and progresses.

What could this mean for dementia research?

• New insight into how inflammation spreads damage through the brain.
• Identification of early biological markers for Alzheimer’s disease.
• New targets for treatments that block harmful cell-to-cell signalling.
• A shift toward more precise, biology-driven dementia therapies.

Dr Jereme Spiers is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Australian National University.  He is a neuroscientist investigating the relationship between neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration.