SOUTH KINGSTOWN — Cerebral blood vessel amyloid deposits which contribute to dementia and brain hemorrhages are often diagnosed late when imaging tests show bleeding, a dilemma neuroscientist William Van Nostrand hopes to solve with a new $3.3 million National Institutes of Health grant.
The five-year grant will fund research to find the biomarkers of the disease – proteins that signify the ailment – so it can be quickly diagnosed and treated to minimize harm from the condition, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, said Van Nostrand, Hermann Professor of Neuroscience at URI’s George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience.
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“We’re looking at blood, but we’re also looking at cerebral-spinal fluid,” Van Nostrand said.
A biological fluid marker not only could potentially provide an earlier, more accurate diagnosis of the disease, but could also help guide treatment options, particularly in therapies where the disease represents a heightened risk of hemorrhage, Van Nostrand said.
“Early and accurate diagnosis of this condition has remained elusive,” said Van Nostrand. “There is a need for biomarkers for early stages of disease prior to the presence of lesions detected by neuroimaging. The purpose of this project is to fill this void by developing and validating robust biological fluid markers for CAA.”
Apart from the late-stage hemorrhaging, which in severe cases can be fatal, cerebral amyloid angiopathy produces a kind of cognitive impairment often described as a slowing in a person’s thinking, Van Nostrand said. The condition is related to Alzheimer’s disease, he said, in that both involve amyloid deposits. CAA occurs alongside Alzheimer’s disease, but also on its own, he said.
The project begins in July, and will be conducted in collaboration with Professor Marcel Verbeek at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands, based on previous work by the Verbeek and Van Nostrand labs that identified potential cerebral amyloid angiopathy biomarkers in brain tissue.
Van Nostrand arrived at the Ryan Institute in the fall of 2017 from Stony Brook, bringing $4.1 million in grant funding with him. He is noted for being the first researcher to purify and characterize amyloid precursor protein, the progenitor of the amyloid-beta protein that forms hallmark plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. “Our goal is ultimately to identify mechanisms of disease that could be targets for new treatments,” he said.
Founded in 2013, the Ryan Institute for Neuroscience is focused on investigating factors in neurodegenerative disease that have been under-explored, including inflammation, the immune system, and the role of blood vessels in the development and progression of disease.
Rob Borkowski is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Borkowski@PBN.com.
