David B. Teplow, Ph.D., (Tarzana) professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was awarded a $7.9-million grant from the National Institute on Aging to lead a national effort to uncover how brain proteins stick together abnormally to cause Alzheimer's. The multidisciplinary project will team experts at Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC Santa Barbara and UCLA.

"Our consortium aims to illuminate — at the most fundamental cellular and biological levels — how the abnormal folding of proteins produces neurological disorders, and to translate our discoveries into effective treatments for Alzheimer's and other aging diseases," explained Teplow, principal investigator and director of the UCLA Biopolymer Laboratory. 

"We knew that no single approach could answer the question of how abnormal protein folding produces disease," he added.  "A multidisciplinary program integrating the efforts of neurologists, physicists, chemists and biologists will create a synergy and potential for new therapies that five individual efforts could not." 

In Alzheimer disease, amyloid proteins clump together to form sticky plaques in the brain, interfering with cells' ability to communicate and eventually causing their death.  This disruption results in the progressive memory loss and inability to think that typifies the disorder. 

Teplow's team suspects that structural changes to the amyloid proteins make them poisonous and lead to Alzheimer's. The researchers hope to unravel how the proteins form these toxins, and translate their findings into the design and testing of new drugs for Alzheimer's and other devastating neurological disorders caused by abnormal protein folding, including Huntington's, Parkinson's and prion diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The multi-site team includes Gal Bitan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology at UCLA; George B. Benedek, Ph.D., the Alfred H. Caspary Professor of Physics and Biological Physics at MIT; Michael Bowers, Ph.D., professor of chemistry at UCSB; and H. Eugene Stanley, Ph.D., university professor at Boston University.

-UCLA- 

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