Grant: Project Grant

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.