Resilience-AD and Longevity Seminar Series

About the Seminar Series
The Resilience-AD and Longevity Seminar Series aims to promote collaboration across the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and Exceptional Longevity (EL) research fields with the goals of highlighting research on the shared etiologies of AD risk, cognitive resilience, and EL and identifying new opportunities to cross-link AD and EL data.

The seminar series is hosted by the Exceptional Longevity Data Management and Coordination Center (EL DMCC) at Sage Bionetworks.

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Past seminars

October 2024 | Using Longitudinal Measures to Capture Key Complementary Dimensions of Cognitive Resilience to Neuropathologies

Date and Time: October 24, 2024 from 9am – 10am PT
Speaker: Dr. Maude Wagner

Description: The concept of cognitive resilience (CR) to Alzheimer’s disease and other neuropathologies can be defined as the continuum from better to worse cognition than expected given the degree of neuropathology in the brain. In this talk, Dr. Maude Wagner will present recently developed longitudinal approaches to quantifying CR at the individual level, and discuss how they can help capture key complementary dimensions of CR and identify risk factors that promote/preserve CR over time.

June 2024 | Examination of Gene-Gene Interaction: Power of Extreme Sampling

Date and Time: June 27, 2024 from 9am – 10am PT
Speaker: Dr. Joseph Lee

Description: Joseph Lee will discuss how his group uses three studies of high- and low-risk cohorts to understand how genes interact with one another, which is likely to be the biological reality for many complex traits such as Alzheimer’s disease and aging traits.  His group focuses on those who escape dementia to old age, despite having strong genetic risk factors, such as the Puerto Rican G206A founder mutation in the PSEN1 gene, to identify and characterize protective modifiers. In addition, he and colleagues examine adults with Down syndrome who have three copies of the APP gene to understand the natural history of dementia in these high-risk individuals.  Once protective (or sometimes risk) genetic modifiers are identified, his group examines exceptional healthy aging cohorts to examine whether the allele frequencies of protective genetic modifiers are elevated in this cohort representing exceptional healthy aging. For two of these studies, his group has longitudinal multiple omic data, including transcriptomic, proteomic, lipidomic and metabolomic, as well as imaging data, to gain insight into potential molecular mechanisms.  Subsequently, his group collaborates with cell biologists to perform functional genomics using iPSC cell lines generated from these individuals. In the present talk, he will share some candidate genes identified from their work.

April 2024 | Synaptic Compensatory Plasticity in Alzheimer’s Disease

Date and Time: April 25, 2024 from 9am – 10am PT
Speaker: Dr. Patricio Opazo

Description: The loss of excitatory synapses is known to underlie the cognitive deficits in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Although much is known about the mechanisms underlying synaptic loss in AD, how neurons compensate for this loss – and whether this provides cognitive benefits – remains almost completely unexplored. In this talk, I will describe two potential compensatory mechanisms implemented following synaptic loss: the enlargement of the surviving neighbouring synapses and the regeneration of synapses. Because dendritic spines – the postsynaptic site of excitatory synapses – are easily visualized using light microscopy, we focus on a range of microscopy approaches to monitor synaptic loss and compensation. In our lab, we use longitudinal dendritic spine imaging – as opposed to fixed-tissue imaging – to gain insights into the temporal dynamics of dendritic spine compensation. We believe that understanding the molecular mechanisms behind these forms of synaptic compensation and regeneration will be critical for the development of therapeutics aiming at delaying the onset of cognitive deficits in AD.