The University of California San Diego has announced a $1.3 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation in support of developing new investigative tools for understanding the origins of—and possible therapies for—neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

The grant will support three principal investigators—Fleur Ferguson and Johannes Schöneberg in the school’s department of chemistry and biochemistry, and Gal Mishne at the university’s Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute—who will collaborate to target, image, and analyze degraded tau proteins with the goal of revealing the cause of protein misfolding, which is linked to neurodegenerative disorders. The cutting-edge research will include novel techniques to target tau proteins, CRISPR technology to tag organelles with fluorescent proteins, the use of four-dimensional imaging, and the development of computational methods to process and analyze the terabytes of data.

In July 2022, the Keck Foundation awarded $1 million to Weill Cornell Medicine to support the development of next-generation high-speed atomic-force microscopy, a key technology for capturing and understanding the dynamics of protein structure.

The accumulation of misfolded proteins is a hallmark of neurodegenerative disorders, and current research is focused on finding what triggers misfolding and identifying ways to clear these proteins from the body. The lifetime risk of developing dementia is one in three and affects an estimated six million people in the United States. According to the World Health Organization, dementia is the seventh leading cause of death among all diseases.

“We believe tau proteins lie at the nexus of not only Alzheimer’s disease pathology, but other forms of neurodegenerative disease, including frontotemporal dementias,” said Howard Feldman, UC San Diego School of Medicine dean of Alzheimer’s disease research. “Learning how to disrupt tau from aggregating and how to promote its more effective clearance is an exciting, emerging new direction in research.”

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