Reprogramming the Damaged Brain to Mop Up Plaque and Other Toxins.

• Position: ALZHEIMER'S DISEASE

The discovery of how to shift damaged brain cells from a diseased state into a healthy one poses a new potential path to treating Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia, according to a collaborative study from researchers at the University of California-San Francisco and Weill Cornell Medicine. The research focuses on microglia, cells that stabilize the brain by clearing out damaged neurons and the protein plaques often associated with dementia and other brain diseases.

'These cells are understudied, despite the fact that changes in them are known to play a significant role in Alzheimer's and other brain diseases," says co-senior author Martin Kamp-mann, associate professor at the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases in the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences.

Adds co-senior author Li Gan, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Institute and the Distinguished Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, "We were able to overcome limitations in microglia research by building a new platform to generate microglia in the lab using inducible stem cells."

"Now, using a new CRISPR (clustered regularly...