SOUTH KINGSTOWN – A University of Rhode Island researcher is part of a transatlantic team awarded a five-year, $8 million grant to the study of the brain’s waste-clearing system as a contributor to cerebral amyloid angiopathy.
The disorder causes brain bleeds and commonly occurs with Alzheimer’s disease.
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William Van Nostrand, co-executive director of the George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience at URI, is part of a group that received the grant from the prestigious Leducq Foundation.
“I am grateful to the Leducq Foundation for their valuable investment in this work,” said Van Nostrand. “I believe this collaboration will lead to important breakthroughs in understanding brain clearance and reveal key insights as to why cerebral amyloid angiopathy and other dementias occur, and how we can treat and prevent them.”
Evidence suggests that a deficiency in brain clearance – the process by which the brain flushes out toxins and harmful waste – plays a crucial role in the disorder, yet there are unknowns about how this process occurs. With the rising aging population, cerebral amyloid angiopathy is increasing, but effective disease-modifying interventions are nonexistent. Understanding the role of clearance will have major implications for understanding it and other dementia disorders, researchers say.
The consortium of investigators is expected to start work after Jan. 1, and will include Van Nostrand, Helene Benveniste [Yale University], Jeffrey Iliff and Andy Shih [University of Washington], and Susanne Van Veluw and Steven Greenberg [Massachusetts General Hospital].
European investigators are Erik Bakker [Amsterdam University Medical Center in the Netherlands], Roxana Carare [University of Southampton in Great Britain], Sylvie Lorthois [Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse in France], Gabor Petzold [German Center for Neurodegenerative Disease], and Matthias Van Osch [Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands].
The network will be led by North American coordinator Susanne Van Veluw and European coordinator Matthias Van Osch.
The consortium will work with innovative transgenic and gene-edited rodent models developed by Van Nostrand, who has studied cerebral amyloid angiopathy for nearly 30 years and recently coauthored key findings on the role of brain clearance in the disorder with investigators at Yale.
The group aims to establish a data-driven, integrated multiscale understanding of perivascular brain clearance in health and cerebral amyloid angiopathy, translate experimental findings from rodent models to the human brain, and identify relevant driving forces to be tested in future clinical trials to enhance brain clearance.
Van Nostrand joined URI in 2017. He is Herrmann Professor of Neuroscience and a professor of biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences at URI’s College of Pharmacy.
