Unlocking the brain key to finding cure for Alzheimer’s disease

With nearly 50 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease worldwide, it is more important than ever that we find new treatments and hopefully a cure for this devastating illness. With that goal in mind, nearly 2,000 clinical trials related to Alzheimer’s disease have been registered on clinicaltrials.gov, yet there are only five FDA approved drugs available to patients, and none can halt or reverse the disease. What are we missing? We are missing a clear understanding of how memory functions normally. We are developing drugs thatwe hope will restore natural, functional memory to patients without a fundamental understanding of the biological mechanisms that enable the brain to store and retrieve memories.

By analogy, imagine you are given the task of fixing a computer that no longer information without knowing the basics of how computers work. How likely are you to find a solution?

Understanding howour brains form and store memories is a crucial question for basic science— science that may not immediately generate a cure, but illuminates how natural biological processes work and provides an invaluable knowledge base that sparks new ideas for diagnostics and treatments. This is the type of research that scientists have been conducting at the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience (MPFI) for the past five years.

Inside each of our brains, there are100 billion neurons. Each of these neurons can connect to up to 10,000 other neurons, making trillions of points of contact throughout the brain. These microscopic points of contact, called synapses, can grow, change shape, and even shrink aswe learn new things, strengthen some memories, and forget others. But how?

Ryohei Yasuda, Scientific Director at MPFI, has focused his laboratory’s work on understanding the molecular players in the formation of memories. There are many ways in which synapses can growand change in response to different types of stimulation. These changes often involve hundreds of steps in a chain of molecular interactions. Yasuda’s team develops tools that give researchers the power to actually visualize these interactions in a portion of a single brain cell so small that it’s invisible even under some microscopes.

But functional memory is more than just molecules in a single synapse between two neurons. Our brains coordinate information fromall over our brains, recruiting hundreds and thousands of cells into organized networks to encode complex information on amuch larger scale. These larger networks are what Yingxue Wang, a new researcher leader joining MPFI in February 2018, hopes to understand. She will lead a team of researchers using a combination of computational, physical, and biological methods to understand how large circuits of neurons encode detailed episodic, or story like, memories.

MPFI is poised to contribute more mean stores ingful research than ever to support efforts to treat and cure devastating diseases of the brain— including Alzheimer’s. Not only is MPFI forging science collaborations with its Palm Beach neighbors, the Scripps Research Institute and Florida Atlantic University’s Brain Institute, but at the end of this month, the institute is hosting the Max Planck Society Neuroscience retreat, “Building Bridges” in Palm Beach County, bringing together directors and group leaders fromover 20Max Planck institutes worldwide studying neuroscience.

Equipped with a better understanding of memory across small and large scales— fromthe individual molecules to the large circuits made up of many cells— scientists will be better able to tackle diseases plaguing human memory, such as Alzheimer’s disease. With National Alzheimer’s Awareness Month coming to a close, there is hope on the horizon for the nearly 5.4 million people with this disease.

Dr. David Fitzpatrick is CEO of the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience.