Giuseppe Faraco
Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY·Neuroscience
Alzheimer's disease and related dementias slowly erode memory and thinking, and no treatments exist. Inflammation in the brain and damage to its blood vessels appear to drive these diseases forward.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
dementia
cognitive impairment
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether colonizing the mouse small intestine with segmented filamentous bacteria expands gut Th17 immune cells, raises blood IL17, and impairs brain blood vessel function and cognition in male, female and aging mice.
- Determine whether circulating IL17 causes brain blood vessel dysfunction and cognitive impairment by activating IL17 receptors on brain endothelial cells, the cells lining blood vessels.
- Test whether inflammatory signals released by IL17-stimulated endothelial cells activate microglia, the brain's resident immune cells, leading to tau protein buildup and cognitive impairment.
More about the research
The immune system outside the brain, including immune cells in the gut, may also play a part. How signals from the body's immune system reach the brain's blood vessels and immune cells to harm cognition remains unclear.
Why it matters
This work could reveal a link between gut bacteria, gut immune cells and tau buildup in dementia. That would open the way to approaches that limit the harmful effects of gut Th17 cells and IL17 on brain health. Such approaches could eventually help people at risk for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, which currently have no treatments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ai-Ling Lin
University of Missouri-Columbia, MO·Neuroscience
Identify how the severity of gut dysbiosis tracks over time with regional amyloid, tau and neurodegeneration markers and cognition in Alzheimer's patients and healthy controls, using PET, 7 Tesla MRI, gut microbiome sequencing and cognitive testing.
Ethan Lippmann
Vanderbilt University, TN·Biomedical Engineering
Measure how dose affects gene and protein silencing by siRNA-EG18, an siRNA linked to an albumin-binding fatty acid carrier, in brain myeloid cells after injection into cerebrospinal fluid, targeting the Alzheimer's risk gene Cd33.
David Durgan
Baylor College of Medicine, TX·Physiology
Identify which gut bacteria produce extracellular vesicles that raise blood pressure, using a dilution scheme to simplify bacterial communities, and test the roles of vesicle flagellin and lipopolysaccharide.
The school
Weill Medical College of Cornell University: 35 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 59 research doctorates a year.
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