Aiming to Mitigate Alzheimer’s Disease

Tell us about the research you conducted as a graduate student. What did your studies find?

I investigated the role of senescence in neurodegenerative disease. Senescent cells — sometimes referred to as "zombie cells" — are cells that wind up in a state of cell-cycle arrest. They stop dividing but don't die off and can accumulate in tissue. Senescent cells are known to increase with age and have inflammatory properties. They could be one of the links between aging and increased risk of neurodegenerative diseases.

I was particularly interested in studying senescence in microglia, one of the main immune cell types that exist in the brain. My research characterized senescent microglia using single-cell RNA sequencing, which analyzes the transcriptome — all the messenger RNA in an organism — at a single-cell level over millions of cells. Describing this population of cells is useful for the field, as senescent microglia are low in number and difficult to characterize fully. I hope this work will spur further interest into this population of cells that Dr. Baker's lab has found to promote neurodegeneration.

I also investigated senescence in a model of Alzheimer's disease. Importantly, I saw improvements in pathology with three different methods of senescent cell removal. The findings suggest that strategies to intervene in the accumulation of senescent cells, which is possible through both genetic and pharmacological means, may have disease-modifying abilities. The papers describing the findings from these two projects are currently in submission. Follow-up studies in Dr. Baker's lab will continue to look at the role of senescence in neurodegenerative disease.

What unique Mayo resources made your research possible?

Mayo Clinic is one of the few institutes in the world that can boast such a high concentration of aging-focused labs in the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging and the Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging Biology at Mayo Clinic. Being able to attend talks and collaborate with the other aging-related labs was invaluable. To conduct my research, I collaborated with the Genome Analysis Core to carry out the RNA sequencing experiments. The staff was extremely knowledgeable and responsive to any questions I had.

What's next?

Being exposed to the highly collaborative environment of Mayo Clinic as well as its many aging-focused labs has reinforced my interest in aging research. I plan to continue studying aging as a postdoctoral fellow in Singapore and hope eventually to work in an academic setting.