This week on the podcast, Stanford psychiatry professor Erin Gibson joins us again to share the latest findings on sleep, myelin, and neurodegenerative disease.
With Knight Initiative support, Stanford researchers uncover a biochemical “off-ramp” in ketosis, rewriting our understanding of how ketosis influences metabolism.
I am a physician-scientist in the Division of Gastroenterology at Stanford University. My clinical and research interest has been in neurogastroenterology. Specifically, my research has been exploring the interplay between immune cells and the enteric nervous system, and evaluating how perturbations of this interaction as a result of aging disrupts gastrointestinal neuromuscular function. Ultimately, my hope is that insights from this research provide novel therapies for treating patients with motility disorders like constipation and irritable bowel syndrome.
Dr. Sellers is a pediatric physician-scientist and research and clinical development consultant. As a pediatric gastroenterologist and ion channel physiologist, Dr. Sellers' work in academia and pharma over the last 20 years has focused on improving the lives of individuals with complex and rare diseases through providing cutting-edge clinical care and advancing research and drug development. Dr. Sellers previously led a basic and translational research laboratory at Stanford, focused on epithelial ion transport and acid-base regulation using a variety of human and animal models.
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we talk with Stanford neurologist Mike Greicius about his critique of new amyloid-clearing Alzheimer's drugs, and his optimism for the next wave of therapies currently in development.
Study in mice, supported by the Knight Initiative, suggests that an experimental cancer drug boosted brain metabolism, restored memory, and improved Alzheimer's symptoms. This novel approach may offer a new way to treat Alzheimer's beyond targeting amyloid plaques.
This project's goal is to enhance brain resilience by promoting vascular brain health during aging. The research team's overarching hypothesis is that many people experience cognitive decline and dementia due to pathological aging. In pathological aging, mild brain injuries that would be repairable in the young, and even in older people with resilience, lead to damaged blood vessels in the brain.
More and more studies suggest that infections may be an important cause of dementia and possibly brain aging more generally. The most convincing evidence exists for herpesviruses, which “hibernate” in the nervous system. Recently, an innovative causal approach in data from the United Kingdom has been used to suggest that shingles (herpes zoster) vaccination prevents or delays dementia. To further investigate this, a clinical trial would be needed, but this is costly and time-consuming.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disease, characterized by progressive motor deficits such as tremor, muscle stiffness, and slowness of movement, affecting six million people worldwide. Despite ongoing efforts to discover the mechanisms underlying this disease, PD remains an incurable disorder. Major challenges include tremendous heterogeneity in disease progression and severity, as well as a lack of reliable, scalable in vitro models to find new therapeutic targets.