A Truce in the BAP-tist/Tau-ist War? Progress Toward A Unified Understanding of Alzheimer's Disease

Speakers

Organizers

Ken Jones, PhD

Forest Research Institute

Ken is a Senior Clinical Scientist in the Department of Psychiatry at Forest Research Institute, the research subsidiary of Forests Labs, the New York based Pharmaceutical company. He has over 20 years of preclinical drug discovery and clinical development experience in the area of CNS disorders. Ken received his PhD in Physiology at Rutgers University studying neuronal networks that control stereotypical behaviors of model organisms. During postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School with Robert Baughman he developed mammalian primary cell culture techniques to map NMDA and AMPA receptors at synaptic and extrasynaptic sites. His subsequent contributions to drug research include the deorphanization of several G-protein-coupled receptors, including the elucidation of the dimeric nature of GABAB receptors, and the co-discovery of a non-visual photoreceptor that regulates circadian rhythms. Prior to joining Forest, Ken ran several early-stage drug development projects in psychiatry at Lundbeck Research USA.

Robert Martone

Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence

Robert Martone is Neuroscience Therapeutic Area Lead for the Covance Biomarker Center of Excellence. He has extensive experience in the pharmaceutical industry leading neuroscience drug discovery and technology teams through all phases of discovery from target identification through clinical trials with expertise in both small molecule and protein therapeutics. He also has several years of academic research experience in molecular neurobiology, with a focus on the molecular genetics of familial neuropathies, and CNS tumor biomarker development.

Robert B. Nelson, PhD

Lundbeck Research USA

Bob Nelson is a Research Fellow at Lundbeck Research USA in Paramus, NJ, where he heads the Neuroinflammation-1 disease biology unit. The goal of this group is to design novel therapeutics based on understanding the intersection between innate immune mechanisms, cerebrovascular inflammation, and central pathology in Alzheimer's and other neurological disorders. Prior to joining Lundbeck in 2010, Bob was a research investigator at Pfizer and overall has 23 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. Bob received his doctorate from Northwestern Univ. in 1987 (under Aryeh Routtenberg) followed by post-doctoral fellowships at DuPont (under Robert Siman) at Harvard Med School (under Huntington Potter).

Jennifer Henry, PhD

The New York Academy of Sciences

Speakers

Frank M. LaFerla, PhD

University of California, Irvine

Professor Frank LaFerla’s research is focused on understanding the pathogenesis of Alzheimer disease, the most common form of dementia among the elderly. His lab has developed several transgenic mouse models of neurodegenerative disorders including the 3xTg-AD mice, which recapitulate the two major neuropathological lesions, plaques and tangles. This model has been widely distributed to researchers throughout the USA and over 20 countries throughout the world. A major research focus of his lab is to understand the relationship between Aß and tau pathology and how each affects the development of the other. Dr. LaFerla is chair of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior and Director of the Institute for Memory Impairments and Neurological Disorders (UCI MIND).  He has received several honors for his research accomplishments including the Ruth Salta Junior Investigator Achievement Award from the American Health Assistance Foundation, Zenith Fellows Award from the Alzheimer Association, UCI Chancellor’s Professorship, Distinguished Mid-career Faculty Research Award, Promising Work Award from the Metropolitan Life Foundation for Medical Research, and was elected as a Fellow to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sylvain E. Lesné, PhD, MSc

University of Minnesota

Dr. Lesné grew up in Luc-sur-mer, a tiny village in Basse-Normandie, France and attended college at the Université de Caen, Basse-Normandie where he graduated with a Master's degree in Biochemistry (major in Neuroscience) and a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology (major in Neuroscience). He joined Dr. Karen H. Ashe's laboratory at the University of Minnesota in November 2002 as a postdoctoral research associate and then moved on to becoming a research associate 2 years later. In December 2009, Dr. Lesné was recruited by the N. Bud Grossman Center for Memory Research and Care as an Institute for Translational Neuroscience Scholar and as tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Lesné's group is focused on understanding the molecular and cellular mechanisms triggered by proteins abnormally aggregating in cerebral brain tissues during the course of neurodegenerative disorders, with a specific focus on Alzheimer's disease.

Bingwei Lu, PhD

Stanford University School of Medicine

Bingwei Lu received his BS degree from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and his PhD degree from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco and Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the labs of Yuh Nung Jan and Lily Jan. He started his independent academic career as Head of Laboratory of Developmental Neurobiology at Rockefeller University and later moved to his current position as Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His laboratory uses Drosophila and mouse models and patient-derived cells to try to understand how the diverse neuronal cell types are generated and properly maintained in the nervous system and how defects in neuronal development and maintenance may contribute to the pathogenesis of devastating brain disorders such as brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases.

Lennart Mucke, MD

Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease

Ralph A. Nixon, MD, PhD

Nathan Kline Institute

Franck Polleux, PhD

Columbia University

Dr Polleux did his undergraduate and graduate studies at Université Claude Bernard in Lyon, (France) where he obtained his Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 1997. He then joined the laboratory of Dr Anirvan Ghosh at Johns Hopkins University for his post-doctoral training. In 2002, Dr Polleux was hired as an Assistant Professor in the Neuroscience Center and Department of Pharmacology at University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill where he became an Associate Professor in 2008. In August 2010, he joined The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In November 2013, he was recruited by the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University to join the new Mind, Brain, Behavior Institute. Throughout his career, Dr Polleux has focused on the identification of the molecular mechanisms underlying neuronal development in the mammalian brain. More recently, his lab also started studying the signaling pathways underlying synaptic loss during early stages of Alzheimer's Disease progression.

Terrence Town, PhD

University of Southern California

Dr. Town's primary focus has been to develop and mechanistically interrogate genetic models of neurologic disorders, with a specific interest in the immune system and inflammation as related to Alzheimer disease (AD). He has experience in the fields of innate immunology, neurobiology, and inflammation, with specific expertise in both in vivo and in vitro models of neuroimmune and neuroinflammatory aspects of AD and other neurodegenerative disorders. The primary goal of his group is to translate basic science discoveries into potential therapies for these devastating disorders of the mind. Despite considerable work in this area, many important questions remain concerning the nature and timing of immune/inflammatory responses in the context of AD, and at what point and how to therapeutically intervene.

Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD

Stanford University School of Medicine

Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD is a professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine and a senior research career scientist at the Veterans Administration Palo Alto Health Care System. He received a PhD in immunology in 1992 from the University of Berne, Switzerland and trained in neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute and The Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease. Wyss-Coray studies the role of immune and injury responses in brain aging and neurodegeneration, pursuing the hypothesis that failing or dysfunctional immune responses underlie or contribute to the demise of the aging brain. He combines the study of mouse models with human clinical samples using cytomic, proteomic, and bioinformatic tools. He is the recipient of an NIH Director's Transformative Research Award, a Zenith award from the Alzheimer's Association, a distinguished scholar award from the John Douglas French Alzheimer Foundation, and he is an inventor on multiple patents.