Evaluating the impact of an aged hematopoietic system on grey matter injury
Description: Age-dependent brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease as well as Progressive Multiple Sclerosis (PMS) represent a major societal and economic burden for patients and their families. What is it about aging that renders the brain susceptible to these diseases? Interestingly, all these diseases share the common feature of immune system involvement. However, links between the aging immune system and the brain remain ill-understood. Our team has developed an animal model of PMS that is age-dependent. We have noted that alterations in the aging immune system are associated with several attributes of PMS, most notably a loss in brain volume and grey matter injury. This provides us with an opportunity to mine what aspects of the aging immune system are associated with PMS-like disease in our animal model, and to verify these findings using a repository of post-mortem brain tissue from PMS patients that we have previously characterized. With these tools in hand, we will perform experiments to characterize what immune cells look like in the aging brain of PMS patients and in our age-dependent animal model. Moreover, using the animal model we can test whether any of these immune cell attributes are connected to disease progression. This discovery pipeline will not only unveil novel immune system pathways that are associated with age-dependent MS progression but has the potential to teach us about how age-dependent changes in the immune system can impact brain health.
Amount: CA$16,670
Funding type: research
Funder scheme: PRIZE - Project Grant - PA: Institute of Aging Prize: Yves Joanette Award of Excellence in Research in Aging
Start date: 2025-03-01
End date: 2026-02-28
Investigator: Jennifer Gommerman
Institution: University of Toronto
Subfield: Neurology
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Funded outputs count: 0
Funder award ID: 198666_1
OpenAlex ID: G1880459685