Aging Brain Seminar - Dr. David Bennett
Description
Biologic Architecture of Age-Related Cognitive Decline
Most clinical-pathology studies Alzheimer¹s disease (AD) relate post-mortem findings to clinical diagnosis. However, the outcome of most therapeutic trials is cognitive decline. Few studies are positioned to relate post-mortem findings to change in cognition over multiple years prior to death. This presentation will introduce two community-based cohort studies of aging and AD in which all participants are organ donors. It will show that AD and other common brain pathologies to account for less than half of the person-specific variability of cognitive change over multiple years prior to death. It will highlight other pathologies and resilience markers associated with cognitive decline. It will show that many risk factors for AD dementia are associated with cognitive decline but not directly associated with any type of pathology or resilience marker identified to date. Finally, it will introduce a high dimensional brain omics pipeline that aims to identify additional proteins associated with cognitive decline and multiple neuropathologies, to nominate genes (proteins) as novel therapeutic targets.
Speaker Bio
Dr. David A. Bennett is the Director of the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center and the Robert C. Borwell Professor of Neurological Sciences at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He is principal of several grants from the NIH includin the Alzheimer’s Disease Core Center, including the Religious Orders Study and the Rush Memory and Aging Project. His pioneering analytic prospective clinical-pathologic cohort studies have linked a wide range of multi-level genomic data, experiential, psychological and medical risk factors to the development of AD and other common chronic conditions of aging. His studies include the investigation of peripheral blood biomarkers, ante- and post-mortem neuroimaging, biomedical devices, neuropathology and neurobiologic indices, as well as deep omics including epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics that are now being used to feed the computational front end of drug discovery pipelines. He has about 600 peer-reviewed manuscript publications, with more than 58,500 citations and an h index=116.