Elizabeth M Bradshaw
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease (AD) slowly destroys memory and thinking, and its causes are still unclear. Large genetic studies have found that many genes tied to late-onset AD work in the innate immune system, the body's first line of defense.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Microbiology & Immunology
Genetics
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
neurodegeneration
dementia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Measure how microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, respond to HSV-1 infection depending on each person's AD-associated genetic background, using transcriptomics and in vitro cell models.
- Examine how genetically varied microglia act as antigen-presenting cells that activate T cells, which help clear active HSV-1 infections.
- Determine how HSV-1 infection and AD genetic risk interact using data from two established cohorts and an anti-viral clinical trial in Alzheimer's disease.
More about the research
Brains of people with AD also contain T cells, immune cells usually kept out of the brain, in the memory-related hippocampus. This has fueled the idea that an infection may help trigger or worsen the disease. One suspect is herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), the cold sore virus, which can invade the nervous system.
Why it matters
If AD risk genes weaken how the brain's immune cells handle herpes virus infection, that link could help explain who develops Alzheimer's disease. The findings could point toward immune pathways to target and help clarify which people with Alzheimer's might benefit from antiviral treatment, as tested in an existing antiviral trial.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Marta Olah
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Measure how many Cluster 7 microglia, a possibly protective immune-cell subset, are present in brain tissue from many older people with and without Alzheimer's dementia, and relate their numbers to sex, age, pathology, risk genes and cognition.
Moriah Szpara
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Microbiology & Immunology
Use high-throughput sequencing and comparative genomics to map HSV1 and HSV2 genetic variation between newborns and within each infant, across virus samples from different body sites.
Donna Neumann
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Microbiology & Immunology
Define how chromatin insulators in the HSV-1 genome form loops that silence viral genes during latency, using human neurons and Chromosome Conformation Capture circular sequencing (4C-seq).
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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