2018_12_07_CIE_cruchaga

Carlos Cruchaga, graduate and PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Navarra, has obtained, together with his team at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) 1.05 million dollars from the Foundation of the creator of Facebook, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), to investigate the role of the immune system in Alzheimer's disease.

Director a scientist at the McDonnell Genome Institute, researcher Navarre has been working for 11 years in the United States on the interaction of several genes related to the immune system and, at the same time, associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's. "In a recent study, we identified the main regulator of extracellular levels of a gene, TREM2, whose genetic variants confer a high risk of developing the disease. "In a recent study, we identified the main regulator of the extracellular levels of a gene, TREM2, whose genetic variants confer a high risk of developing the disease. This gene, moreover, is not related to the beta-amyloid protein (whose presence has been studied for decades in relation to development of the pathology), but to the response of our immune system, since it is expressed in the microglia, which would be the equivalent of the brain's white blood cells," explains the professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at the North American university.

"The identification of the gene opened new avenues to knowledge about this disease, since it showed that there are processes involved in it beyond the beta-amyeloid protein. And in our study, we also identified another gene, called MS4A4A, which is part of the TREM2 metabolic pathway," adds Cruchaga. This protein is also abundant in microglia and, therefore, leads the experts to believe that it is involved in inflammation processes, thus demonstrating the relationship between the immune system and development Alzheimer's disease.

9 million dollars for research on neurodegenerative diseases

Carlos Cruchaga's group of research , which has received one of the grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative foundation, is made up of researchers from different fields, bioinformatics experts, neurologists, etc. "Our team, multidisciplinary and translational, now plans to use new high performing techniques of genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics, together with inducible stem cells and data clinical, to elucidate the mechanism by which the two genes we have discovered interact and how that interaction modulates the brain's immune system and modifies it generating an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease," culminates Cruchaga.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscillia Chan, has dedicated $9 million to fund research projects aimed at identifying new therapeutic targets for neurodegenerative diseases through partnership among clinicians, engineers, computational biologists, geneticists and molecular biologists.

Carlos Cruchaga, a native of Barañain (Navarra), did his doctoral thesis in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Navarra thanks to a scholarship of the association of Friends of the University. Subsequently, he did a postdoctoral stay at the laboratory of Neurogenetics of the Cima University of Navarra, where he investigated the genetic causes of neurodegenerative diseases, under the direction of Dr. Pau Pastor. Since 2007 he is researcher and professor at Washington University in St. Louis (USA).