Levi Beverly, PhD, believes he can use his cancer research to help in the quest to understand a cause and find a cure for Alzheimer鈥檚 disease, and the National Institute on Aging is providing funding to allow him to investigate further.
To generate new ideas in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease research, the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health, has offered researchers in other fields already funded by the NIH additional money to explore links between their current field of research and Alzheimer鈥檚 disease. Beverly, a UofL cancer researcher, has received one of the first rounds of these $385,000 awards.
鈥淭hey are hoping to spark some new directions, uncovering potential new areas for research,鈥 said Beverly, PhD, associate professor of medicine at UofL. 鈥淭his will get more people involved in the work and develop some preliminary seed data.鈥
Alzheimer鈥檚 and other neurodegenerative diseases affect more than 5 million people in the United States. As the population ages, this number is increasing.
Beverly鈥檚 primary research grant from the National Cancer Institute is to study ubiquilin proteins in cancer. Ubiquilin proteins are critical adapters that appear to be central to signaling pathways driving Alzheimer鈥檚 disease as well as cancer.
鈥淭he protein ubiquilin is lost in both cancer and Alzheimer鈥檚 and other neurodegenerative diseases,鈥 Beverly said. 鈥淲hat we hope to discover is how this protein, which is associated with aberrant cell growth in cancer, also is associated with aberrant cell death in neurodegenerative diseases.鈥
Beverly plans to use the new funding to determine whether and how ubiquilin regulates contradictory signaling pathways in neuronal cells and epithelial cells, and how the loss of ubiquilin affects multiple types of tissues.
Robert Friedland, MD, professor of neurology at UofL who has conducted research in Alzheimer鈥檚 disease for more than three decades, is collaborating with Beverly on the project. 聽
鈥淲e have known for many years that protein folding patterns are critical to neuronal damage in Alzheimer’s,鈥 Friedland said. 鈥淭he work Dr. Beverly has done with ubiquilin has uncovered pathways that may be involved in key mechanisms of both Alzheimer鈥檚 disease and cancer. We anticipate that the interaction of researchers in cancer and neurodegeneration will help advance both fields.鈥
With combined annual national expenditures of approximately $300 billion for cancer and Alzheimer鈥檚 diseases in the U.S., these conditions represent two of the largest burdens on the health care system. Beverly believes the laboratory research conducted in this project will facilitate the development of therapeutic interventions for these diseases.
鈥淥nly by understanding the basic molecular, biochemical and genetic causes of these diseases will we be able to make significant progress in treating these patients,鈥 Beverly said.
