8th annual symposium on Alzheimer’s draws top researchers

For some at the 8th annual Zilkha Symposium on Alzheimer Disease & Related Disorders, it was the best meeting of the year. This year’s event, hosted by University of Southern California, was extra special for many of the speakers because it was the first time since 2019 that they got to see their colleagues.

“This is my first travel after the pandemic so it’s very special,” said Li-Huei Tsai, PhD, professor of neuroscience and director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Speakers and attendees included researchers from elite institutions all over the country who are working to find causes, therapies, and cures for Alzheimer’s disease.

“There’s always good discourse here,” said Rudolph Tanzi, PhD, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School who discovered the first three Alzheimer’s disease genes. “Seeing the top of the top Alzheimer’s researchers speak—especially sharing their unpublished data—along with the camaraderie and the receptions just makes for a great meeting.”

Various talks throughout the day focused on different avenues of Alzheimer’s disease, a debilitating progressive disease, which affects an estimated 44 million people around the world with no known cure.

Tanzi presented his unpublished theory surrounding the evolutionary function of why variant genes that cause Alzheimer’s survive in the population today. He and his team propose that the pathology that accumulates in the brain in Alzheimer’s patients and with age is actually meant to protect the brain against infection. He said that the harmful pathology is an orchestrated, innate immune defense that led to conservation of these gene mutations and variants which predispose people to have the disease today.

“It’s great when you get to go to a symposium that’s not thousands of people where you can really hear the most up to date thing from the best labs around,”

–David Holtzman, MD

In addition to being a speaker, Tanzi is one of the co-organizers of the symposium, along with David Holtzman, MD, and Berislav Zlokovic, MD & PhD. Holtzman is a professor of neurology, scientific director of the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders, and associate director of the Knight Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis..

“It’s great when you get to go to a symposium that’s not thousands of people where you can really hear the most up to date thing from the best labs around,” Holtzman said.

His talk was about the role of microglial cells, which impact immune function in the brain, and how these cells play different roles in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease. Many of the different risk factor genes are expressed in the brain exclusively in microglial cells, not in the neurons or astrocytes. That is why Holtzman’s team is seeking to determine what these inflammatory cells of the brain are doing in relation to increasing risk for disease. This research is also looking at targeting them as a therapeutic approach.

“You get an idea where the field is moving even before the data are published.”
–Berislav Zlokovic, MD, PhD

Zlokovic, the director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute and chair of physiology and neuroscience at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, said another benefit of the symposium is people starting new collaborations based on networking at the meeting.

“The primary goal is science and how to move the field forward,” Zlokovic said. “You get an idea where the field is moving even before the data are published.”

Alzheimer’s is a very complex disease, and this symposium provides an avenue for top researchers to incorporate each other’s concepts and ideas about various factors to further enrich the field and promote new therapeutic discoveries, he said.

“How these factors interact, and how the genes that control these factors interact is really something that we start learning,” Zlokovic said. “That opens up the way to answer the mystery of Alzheimer’s.”

Sangram Sisodia, PhD, a professor of neurobiology and director of the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago, presented work about another factor that affects Alzheimer pathology—the microbiome.

“The microbiome is an incredible system that controls so much of what goes on in your body,” Sisodia said. “The bacteria are not there just to chew up the food that you eat and break it up into smaller metabolites…They control circadian rhythms. They control everything you could imagine. And turns out the microbiome has a huge impact on plaques in the brain.”

Sisodia’s lab found that changing the microbiome makeup in the gut affected the amount of plaque in the brain. They found that various bacteria can activate microglia in the brain to go after amyloid that is deposited, which can lead to Alzheimer’s. But the million dollar question now is to find the signaling and specific bacteria that contribute to this so they can potentially be targeted for therapy.

“I give talks all over the world, especially before COVID, but when I come here I spend more time on my talks because the scrutiny is going to be much higher.”
–Constantino Iadecola, MD

Smaller conferences like this have a different energy, said Constantino Iadecola, MD, professor of neurology & neuroscience and director & chair of the Feil Family Brain & Mind Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College.

“We are all very critical of each other in a constructive way,” he said. “I give talks all over the world, especially before COVID, but when I come here I spend more time on my talks because the scrutiny is going to be much higher. People are very committed—not to shut you down—but to improve what you’re doing.”

Iadecola presented data from his lab exploring how APOE compromises the ability of blood vessels to serve the needs of the brain, and how this relates to Alzheimer’s pathology.

“I think every year this meeting gets better,” he said. “There is a lot of respect for each other’s science. It’s a society to help each other, but without allowing things which are not up to snuff. There’s always leaps in the science. And here, you experience those leaps.”

Read more about the research from University of Southern California on Alzheimer’s Disease at https://keck.usc.edu/category/news/zilkha/.