EXOSOMES_AD · The role of extracellular vesicles in Alzheimer’s Disease: towards obtaining mechanistic insights to intrinsic protection mechanisms

The role of extracellular vesicles in Alzheimer’s Disease: towards obtaining mechanistic insights to intrinsic protection mechanisms

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia worldwide, affecting more than 30 million people. Nowadays, the cause of the disease is still not known, and there is no causal treatment. The severity of this pathology is more than to the patients that suffer from it but also to the relatives and health systems that accompany them during the evolution of this usually long-lasting fatal disease. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the molecular causes of the pathology to define biological signatures of the early stages of the disease and then be able to apply treatments before the damage severely affects the patient’s daily life. In this project, my main goal was to understand a molecular and cellular mechanism that may initiate and regulate AD’s pathology: the extracellular vesicles (EVs). The EVs are tiny nanovesicles released by all cells that serve as crucial messengers in cell-to-cell molecular communication, even across different organs. In the context of AD, it was described that they carry an essential protein responsible for brain damage (the beta-amyloid protein, Aβ), but their whole function was not defined. We hypothesized that the EVs are responsible for aggregating the Aβ and forming the amyloid plaques, reducing its toxicity and overall neuroprotective. To assess this, EVs from AD patients' brain tissue and cell culture models have been studied profoundly using state-of-the-art proteomic and microscopy techniques. The unique ability of EVs to transmit molecular information between cells and tissues positions them as a prime target for deciphering the pathophysiological state of tissues and the progression of the disease. Interestingly, they can be readily found in accessible biofluids like blood or urine, making them ideal biomarkers for disease diagnosis and prognosis without directly approaching the brain tissue, with the inconvenience and risk that this implies. So, studying them in the brain could potentially provide us with molecular biomarkers for the early diagnosis of the disease.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз