The National Institute on Aging's Aging Research Federal Grant Program (CFDA 93.866) awarded a $7,704,350 Project Grant to The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, doing business as Clinical Practices of the University of Pennsylvania, for the research project "Mechanisms Underlying Heterogeneity of Cognitive Outcomes in Synucleinopathy". The project aims to understand why the same underlying pathology, namely inclusions of alpha-synuclein, varies widely in the pace and...
This three-year, $3.4 million Project Grant from the National Institute on Aging will support research into the combinatorial effects of post-translational modifications on alpha-synuclein structure, function, and aggregation. The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania will investigate how multiple simultaneous modifications to alpha-synuclein impact its interactions with lipid bilayers, self-association kinetics, aggregate structural features, internalization by neurons, and seeded...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging's (NIA) Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866) provides $660,402 to the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) to study the role of autophagy, a cellular process that recycles damaged components, in regulating lipid metabolism and inflammation in microglia during brain aging and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's disease (AD). The research aims to determine how microglial lipid phagocytosis inhibits autophagy, leading to the...
This Project Grant award of $246,248.00 from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) under the Extramural Research Programs in the Neurosciences and Neurological Disorders (CFDA 93.853) program supports research to investigate how disrupted autophagy contributes to the inflammation and plaque formation associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression. The primary awardee, The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, will use innovative iPSC models and...
The National Institute on Aging awarded a $871,093 Project Grant (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) to the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, NY. The 5-year grant from January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2029 will fund research to elucidate the mechanisms underlying the regulation of the transcription factor EB (TFEB) and the autophagy-lysosomal pathway, and investigate their therapeutic potential as treatments for Alzheimer's disease. The research will utilize...
The National Institute on Aging (NIA) awarded a $1,018,516 Project Grant under the Aging Research Federal Grant Program (CFDA 93.866) to the Regents of the University of Minnesota to develop advanced multiplexing technologies using innovative dual-channel dark-FRET biosensors. The goal is to enable dynamic monitoring of alpha-synuclein pathophysiology across cellular and in vivo models of Parkinson's disease and related synucleinopathies. The biosensors will allow simultaneous tracking of...
The National Institute on Aging (NIA), under the Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866), awarded a $1,684,689 project grant to Weill Medical College of Cornell University to study the role of microglial lysosomes in the degradation of amyloid-beta, a key pathological feature of Alzheimer's disease. The 3-year project aims to characterize the process of "digestive exophagy" used by microglia to limit the expansion of amyloid-beta plaques, as well as explore the effects of genetic...
This Project Grant award, funded by the National Institute on Aging under the Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866), provides $429,000 to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston to investigate ultrastructural changes to neuronal autophagy during the aging process. The research aims to compare the structural features of axonal autophagic vesicles in aging neurons and determine how the autophagy component WIPI2 can rescue age-related autophagy defects. The study utilizes innovative...
This federal Project Grant award for $461,313, provided by the National Institute on Aging under the Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866), supports research to investigate the role of the protein CSPα in regulating synaptic autophagy and its implications for neurodegenerative diseases. The research aims to characterize synaptic vesicles, autophagosomes, and related proteins in wild-type, CSPα knockout, and CLN4 (a neurodegenerative disease) models using techniques such as electron microscopy,...
This Project Grant award from the National Institute on Aging's Aging Research program (CFDA 93.866) will fund research to study neuronal proteostasis, the maintenance of protein health, during aging and Alzheimer's disease (AD). The award of $131,027 to The Leland Stanford Junior University will support the development and application of a novel protein tagging technique called bioorthogonal non-canonical amino acid tagging (BONCAT) to examine changes in neuronal protein turnover with aging and...
This National Institute on Aging (NIA) Project Grant award (CFDA 93.866 - Aging Research) to The Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania in the amount of $1,086,563 will fund research to define the regulation of lysosome-mediated pathways, including autophagy and endolysosomal processes, within and between astrocytes and neurons in response to proteotoxic stress induced by alpha-synuclein aggregation. The research aims to elucidate cell-type-specific differences in how neurons and astrocytes manage quality control pathways to maintain proteostasis, as well as the coupling of neuron-astrocyte stress responses to alpha-synuclein proteotoxins. The project employs advanced live-cell imaging, quantitative cell biology, and biochemistry techniques to investigate these processes and reveal new insights into the management of quality control pathways in the neuron-astrocyte unit under proteotoxic stress. The findings are expected to inform our understanding of neuronal vulnerabilities in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and ALS.