Year 2

During the first 4 years of this CIRM grant, my lab developed novel methods to assess adaptive immune responses to the Alzheimer’s-linked peptide, amyloid-beta/Abeta, in human blood samples. This technique relies on the use of pluripotent stem cells to produce specific immune-modulating cells in a complicated differentiation process that takes ~50 days. Over the past year we have found that this technology can employ both human embryonic stem cells and induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), the latter of which were developed in my lab through other funding sources. We have now confirmed that this method provides consistent and robust readouts. Over the past year we have moved into the clinical phase of this project and assessed these responses in over 60 human subjects. Control subjects (not affected by Alzheimer’s disease) were recruited from the university community. Initially, we looked for age-dependent changes in these responses with a cohort of >50 research subjects who ranged in age from 20-88 years. Interesting patterns emerged from that study, which are currently being prepared for publication, and will remain confidential until publication; further details are not provided in this report as it will become public record. Several Alzheimer’s patients have also been assessed. We recently entered into an agreement with a local Alzheimer’s assessment center that will allow us to expand our study by including subjects with a presumptive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and other causes of dementia such as Fronto-temporal Dementia, Dementia with Lewy bodies and Vascular Dementia. It will be interesting to determine if the assay we have developed will be able to distinguish subjects with developing Alzheimer’s pathology from those with other causes of dementia, using a small blood sample. Overall, our progress is on-track for this project to be completed at the end of year 5, with many more subject samples analyzed than were originally proposed. In the approved grant it was proposed that spleen samples from 6-8 organ donors would be assessed, but as we developed this technology it became clear that we can detect these responses using 20 mL whole blood samples from living human subjects. At present, we have used our assay to assess more than 60 human subjects – 10 times what was proposed – and by this time next year we estimate that number will double. Information gained from this research is providing exciting new insights into immune changes associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The Western University of Health Sciences is engaged in patent processes to secure intellectual property and commercialize this technology.