Monday, February 7, 2022, 12:15 AM – 1:45 PM EST
Annabelle Singer, McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech and Emory University
“Decoding Memory in Health and Alzheimer’s Disease: From Deficits in Neural Codes to Neural Stimulation that Boosts Immune Function”
We don’t often hear of promising developments in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but in this talk Annabelle Singer will describe how she and her fellow researchers have discovered new neural stimulation approaches that do offer great promise in treating the disease. After examining how neural codes fail in the transgenic mice that are the primary animal model of AD, they have learned how to stimulate specific frequencies of activity lacking in the mice, discovering that a non-invasive “flicker treatment” (using light and sound) mobilizes the immune system and reduces pathogenic proteins. They are translating their discoveries from rodents to humans, and Dr. Singer will describe how the human feasibility studies are going. The very good news? It’s already clear that this work could lead to new therapies for Alzheimer’s disease by driving specific patterns of neural activity to impact the disease at the cognitive, cellular, and molecular levels. It may also be broadly applicable in the treatment of other neurodegenerative diseases.