2023-04-26 04:39:00
The Toulouse researcher Laure Verret is one of the 2023 winners of the Vaincre Alzheimer foundation. It benefits from a grant of €100,000 for the next two years. In her work, she studies the functioning of essential neurons in the organization of cerebral activity.
Already a winner in 2015, Dr Laure Verret is once once more supported by the Vaincre Alzheimer foundation, which has just awarded her €100,000 in subsidies for the work she is carrying out at the CRCA (1)
How do you approach Alzheimer’s disease?
I have been interested for ten years in a category of neurons, the so-called parvalbumin neurons. These are inhibitory neurons, they are there to control the other neurons, they have the role of conductor. This control is essential so that everyone plays the same way in the brain, so that there is no shambles and therefore for the maintenance of memories. The brain can then identify what is important.
“We don’t know how to cure Alzheimer’s disease. The goal is to slow down and mask the symptoms”
Are these neurons modified by Alzheimer’s disease?
In the context of Alzheimer’s disease, these parvalbumin neurons have lost their matrix which forms a coat around them. And without their matrix, the neurons no longer do anything. By stimulating these neurons in our models of mice with Alzheimer’s disease, either by a molecule or by placing them in an enriched environment, they regain their matrix.
Our hypothesis is to say that neurons create the matrix when they are solicited. In our work, we are interested in maintaining the matrix and what can prevent it from growing back.
How can your work improve the management of Alzheimer’s disease?
I think it is important to remember that we do not know how to cure Alzheimer’s disease and that is not the goal. The objective remains to slow down or even mask symptoms such as behavioral problems, this is what counts for healthy aging.
The message is that there is a form of cognitive reserve in the brain that must be stimulated from the start of the pathology. And it works on our genetically modified mice with Alzheimer’s.
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