Bart de Strooper

Guest Speaker: Prof. Bart de Strooper (Laboratory for the research of neurodegenerative diseases Leuven Brain Institute (Belgium) & Dementia research institute (UK)).

Host: Evgenia Salta

Abstract

The familial forms of Alzheimer’s Disease indicate that amyloid plaque formation is an initial triggering step of the pathology. However, genetics of sporadic Alzheimer’s Disease suggest that risk of dementia is largely determined by the way glia and blood vessel cells cope with this amyloid stress. I will discuss recent work of our laboratory that demonstrates how human cell types react to amyloid plaque stress and how this leads to Tau pathology and neuronal cell loss in xenograft models of Alzheimer’s Disease.