Transcript
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[Title card animation: Dementia Australia Research Foundation - Treat]
[Dr Leah Beauchamp, The Florey Institute of Neuroscience & Mental Health]
Dr Leah: My name is Dr Leah Beauchamp. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow in the Neurotherapeutics Laboratory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health. In 2017, my grandfather passed away with Alzheimer's disease. He was diagnosed when I was 16, and for 10 years, I saw the effects that Alzheimer's disease has on a family, and it's really driven my work into dementia therapeutics as a scientist. Alzheimer's disease is a what we call a neurodegenerative disease. People with Alzheimer's become forgetful and confused, and eventually, they lose all of their memories. And we know that in the brain, this is caused by neuronal death in specific areas, and that's because of a toxic build-up of proteins.
My research involves one of these toxic proteins that builds up in the Alzheimer's brain called tau. We need tau for healthy brains and for healthy ageing, and we know that in Alzheimer's disease, tau gets changed. And when it's changed, it becomes sticky, and it aggregates, and it becomes toxic to the cells, so my research is investigating ways that we can clear this protein from the brain.
We know that the protein tau exists in many forms in the brain, and in Alzheimer's disease, the toxic form actually outweighs the healthy form. And it can do this because one of the regulatory proteins that are involved is sort of turned down - it's like a light bulb that's been dimmed and it can't do its job anymore. So, my research really focuses on how we can turn that light bulb back up, how we can activate that protein, and I can do that in two different ways. I could either increase the amount of electricity going into the light bulb, therefore, I can use drugs to supplement that protein and make it activated, or I can remove the dimmer switch. I can stop the protein from being able to be turned down anymore in these cells. And they're the two different classes of compounds that I'm investigating in this grant.
We've developed these classes of compounds in the lab, and we've tested them in cells, and they show really good efficacy. What we really need to do now for them to have real implications is to translate them into a whole organism, and we do this using dementia animal models. This Dementia Australia Research Foundation grant is going to be used for us to take these candidate compounds and actually test them in models of dementia, and make sure that they perform the same way they do in cells, and this is going to generate preclinical data, hopefully, so that one day we can move these compounds into clinical trials in people.
What this research really shows is that there is hope for the future. These compounds may become future therapeutics, but what they really show is that we haven't exhausted all avenues of research yet. We still have innovative and creative ideas coming through the lab, and what this really does is broaden the scope of how we approach dementia therapeutics going forward. I'd like to thank the Dementia Australia Research Foundation in the form of the Bondi2Berry Project Grant for allowing us to translate this research into the next phase, and for supporting my science.
[Title card]
This research is supported by:
Bondi2Berry Project Grant
The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health
Dr Beauchamp would like to acknowledge the research team:
Professor Kevin Farnham and Xiang Liu
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[Title card]
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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