Professor given grant to expand Alzheimer’s research

Benjamin Wolozin, a Boston University School of Medicine professor, received a three-year grant from the Alzheimer’s Association for his work in studying the proteins responsible for causing Alzheimer’s disease Wednesday.

“I’ve been in the field for a long time, and this is a long-standing award,” said Wolozin. “This is an award that goes to people who are senior in the field who have an outstanding project.”

Wolozin is among four winners of the Zenith Fellows Award. He has been given $450,000 by the Zenith Society, which aims to eliminate Alzheimer’s disease through providing care for those effected by the disease and to people supporting research. The Zenith Society consists of benefactors also associated with organizing philanthropy for the Alzheimer’s Association.

The Zenith Fellows Award program aims to encourage innovative research approaches regarding the causes and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, said Dr. Dean Hartley, director of science initiatives at the Alzheimer’s Association. All applicants must have already contributed to research behind treating Alzheimer’s.

“The person who applies must be in a senior position; so they must have contributed to the field through their body of work, and they must have seen significant funding during that time to suggest they’ve been very productive,” Hartley said. “But one of the most important aspects of the Zenith Fellowships is that they are working on an area that is really kind of novel to the Alzheimer’s field.”

Wolozin’s approach to understanding Alzheimer’s disease emphasizes the relation of stress to the accumulation of protein tangles seen in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s won him the award. His research investigates the impact of inappropriate aggregation of RNA binding proteins, which control DNA splicing. In brain cells, this affects the transport of mRNA from the nucleus to the outer reaches of the cell.

“If you have a chronic disease, like let’s say you’re a football player and you bang your head a lot, or let’s say you have heart disease and you don’t get enough blood to your brain … Your brain is chronically stressed,” Wolozin said. “You turn these things on and they stay on for too long and you get what I call ‘pathological stress granules.’”

These granules, which inevitably increase with age and stress, are what cause Alzheimer’s disease, Wolozin said. He intends to use the research money for further investigating the pathology of the disease and ultimately investigating ways to counter their source.

“The first part of the grant is going to go and look to see the exact mechanism through which these RNA binding proteins actually stimulate the type of pathology that occurs in Alzheimer’s disease,” Wolozin said. “And then the second part of the grant will test it. If these things are really important for causing Alzheimer’s disease, then if we perhaps inhibit them a little bit we should be able to reduce the pathology.”

Wolozin said he foresees his research as having the potential to allow new methods of treating Alzheimer’s, thereby reducing both the prevalence of the disease and its large cost on the health care system. Up to 10 percent of people are demented by 65 years old, but that number increases to 50 percent for people older than 85 years old.

“Alzheimer’s is the most common degenerative disease in the brain affecting millions of people in the U.S. and costing billions of dollars because people with Alzheimer’s require a lot of care in nursing homes,” Wolozin said. “So, should we develop a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, it would save the nation millions of dollars by allowing the elderly to live at home and remain functional, rather than face losing their mind.”