Lezioni dal cervello di un moscerino | Teresa Niccoli | TEDxFoggia

Quick Overview

Teresa Niccoli presents research demonstrating that the Alzheimer's disease process, characterized by the accumulation of toxic Beta-amyloid and Tau proteins, begins 20-30 years before clinical symptoms appear, using fruit flies (Drosophila) as a model system to study and potentially intervene in the disease progression by promoting neuronal resilience.

Key Points: Alzheimer's disease is a progressive, neurodegenerative condition where toxic proteins (Beta-amyloid and Tau) accumulate in the brain 20 to 30 years before symptoms manifest. Dementia is the most common cause of death in UK women in 2022, surpassing Alzheimer's, heart attacks, chronic respiratory diseases, and lung cancer. The speaker's lab uses fruit flies (Drosophila), which share over 70% of disease-causing genes with humans, as a simplified model to study these mechanisms in vivo. When Drosophila are engineered to express human Alzheimer's pathology (like Beta-amyloid), they show reduced climbing ability and shorter lifespan compared to controls. The drug Metformin, typically used for diabetes, was tested and shown to increase the resilience of neurons against Alzheimer's pathology in the fly models, allowing them to climb better and live longer. Personal and collective resilience, focusing on modifiable risk factors (which account for 45% of Alzheimer's risk according to The Lancet Commission), is crucial for prevention. The researchers can observe neuronal activity and protein deposition in real-time in the fly brains, offering tools to test potential therapies.

Context: Teresa Niccoli, an Associate Professor at the Institute of Healthy Ageing at UCL, delivers a TEDxFoggia talk titled "Lessons from the brain of a fruit fly" (Lezioni dal cervello di un moscerino). She discusses her research into Alzheimer's disease, emphasizing that the pathology begins decades before symptoms appear. To study this long-latency disease, her team utilizes the fruit fly, Drosophila, as a genetically tractable and cost-effective model organism that shares significant genetic similarity with humans.