[NSF-01] How neurons keep calm and carry on: roles of quality control in neurodegenerative diseases

[NSF-01-3] Endosomal-lysosomal pathway in Alzheimer's disease

^○Gunnar K. Gouras (Experimental Dementia Research Unit, Lund University)

Gunnar K. Gouras is Professor of Experimental Neurology and heads the Experimental Dementia Research Unit in the Faculty of Medicine of Lund University in Lund, Sweden. Prior to his move to Lund in 2011, he was professor of neurology and neuroscience at Cornell University. He obtained his doctorate in medicine at Columbia University and completed his clinical neurology residency at Harvard and postdoctoral research on Alzheimer’s at Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Rockefeller universities. His research has focused on the cellular and synaptic biology of AD-linked beta-amyloid (Abeta). In 2000 he provided the first evidence that particularly the disease-linked Abeta42 variant accumulates early within vulnerable neurons in Down syndrome and AD brains. Utilising immuno-electron microscopy his group subsequently discovered that Abeta42 localises to multivesicular bodies of neurons in the brain and with AD preferentially accumulates and aggregates in synaptic terminals, providing the 1st physical link between Abeta and synapses (Takahashi RH et al., 2002; 2004) as well as Abeta and tau pathologies in synapses (Takahashi RH et al., 2010). Recent work has focused on the native conformation of Abeta in brain (Klementieva et al., 2017) and the cell biology of impaired Abeta degradation and aggregation in neurons (Willen et al., 2017).