Selva Baltan, PhD, Neurosciences, received a 4-year $1.2M R01 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute on Aging (NIA) to study "Vulnerability of aging white matter to ischemia."
Stroke is the third leading cause of death in the US with an enormous cost to national health resources. This proposal is critically designed to include and explore axon injury (white matter) during stroke, considering age as the main risk factor. The study will suggest age-specific therapeutic approaches for stroke victims.
Claudio Fiocchi, MD, Pathobiology, has been awarded a 4-year, $1.2M grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to study "The role of lymphangiogenesis in IBD pathogenesis."
The proposed studies aim at understanding the function of the lymphatic system in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The lymphatic vessels are similar to blood vessels but, instead of carrying red blood cells, white blood cells, oxygen and nutrients throughout the body, they carry the bulk of the immune cells responsible for the body's defense. Therefore, the function of the intestinal lymphatic system is closely related to the function of the gut immune system, and any abnormality of lymphatic function may impair the local immune response and cause gut inflammation. There is preliminary evidence indicating that the gut lymphatic system is overly extended in IBD patients, but its capacity to carry immune cells away from sites of inflammation is deficient. If so, an excessive accumulation of immune cells occurs in the tissue causing inflammation to linger, as typically seen in IBD patients. A series of experiments are therefore proposed to understand why the lymphatic system fails to work efficiently in the gut affected by IBD, and what can be done to restore its normal function and eliminate inflammation.
Bruce Lamb, PhD, lead investigator, Sanjay Pimplikar, PhD,andRichard Ransohoff, MD,of Neurosciences, andGary Landreth, PhD,of Case Western Reserve University, received a 3-year, $1M program project grant, "The Role of Mononuclear Phagocytes in Alzheimer's Disease," from the Alzheimer's Association, with support from a donation by Jane and Lee Seidman.
This study will examine the role of the immune system in Alzheimer's disease. In particular, it is focused on the role of two different immune cells on Alzheimer's pathologies. First are microglial cells, which are the resident immune cells of the brain and second are monocytes, which are infiltrating immune cells from the periphery. Researchers are interested in identifying the role these two cell types play in development on Alzheimer's phenotypes (including amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles) by using various mouse models.