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At the UW ADRC, senior and junior investigators convene at a monthly meeting called the Tau Working Group. This mentoring and study group serves as an incubator to generate new studies and mentor junior investigators. It’s a chance for investigators to bounce their hypotheses off their peers, strike up collaborations, give updates on ongoing projects, and get help with developing grant proposals that are critical to moving a career in research forward.
Caitlin Latimer, MD, PhD, UW assistant professor of laboratory medicine and pathology, who is co-leader of the ADRC Neuropathology Core, was still a neuropathology trainee when she joined the Tau Working Group. She now leads the discussions. “What I get out of this group is the interdisciplinary connections and seeing how different people approach the same problem and how they think about it,” she says.
The Tau Working Group gave Latimer the chance to discuss her findings about tau and TDP-34 proteins in human brain tissue with Brian Kraemer, PhD and Nicole Liachko, PhD who study these proteins in worms genetically engineered to make Alzheimer’s proteins. This interaction sparked a successful collaboration to explore her hypothesis in a basic model organism. “My K08 career award (Molecular mechanisms of synergistic TDP- 43 and tau proteotoxicity in Alzheimer’s disease) really developed out of these interactions.”
Nicole Liachko, PhD, UW research assistant professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine, has been involved in the Tau Working Group for several years. “It’s been a great resource for collaborative ideas for my own work,” she says. “My lab has contributed to two publications that resulted from discussions and collaborations formed in this group, and I expect we’ll have more in the future as work in progress gets written up.” Building on those papers, Liachko has received three funded grants to study aspects of protein co-pathology in Alzheimer’s disease. “I’m still collaborating with other members of the Tau Working Group on those projects,” she says, “so it’s been incredibly fruitful scientifically.”
The group owes its beginning to Thomas Bird, MD, UW professor emeritus of neurology and C. Dirk Keene, MD, PhD, UW associate professor of pathology. About 5 years ago, they gathered a small group to perform a detailed neuropathological study of the ADRC collection of brains from people with familial frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and mutations in the gene that codes for the tau protein (MAPT). They wanted a group with different areas of expertise on tau to focus on similarities and differences within families and between families, in order to understand how different genetic mutations affect the brain. The group has since grown in scope, turning into the interdisciplinary study group and research incubator it is today.
Kimiko Domoto-Reilly, MD, UW assistant professor of neurology, is another researcher who has benefited from developing her research project in the Tau Working Group. She is investigating an unusual imaging finding in people diagnosed with FTD during life, who donated their brains for post-mortem imaging and tissue analysis. “I have found the collaborative, interdisciplinary discussions of the Tau Working Group so informative,” she says. “They guide my analysis of combining clinical assessments with neuropathologic and imaging data.” The ADRC is grateful to the Takayama family for supporting this work.
“The Tau Working Group has such a good track record of converting ideas into grants and funding,” says UW ADRC Director Thomas Grabowski, MD. “I see this working group as a successful model of faculty mentoring. We are creating other such groups at the ADRC, most immediately one focused on cognitive resilience.” • Genevieve Wanucha
Related Opportunity for Investigators:
ADRC “Resilience Working Group” meeting: The UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center is interested in expanding its research focus on resilience in neurodegenerative disease, i.e. the phenomenon whereby some individuals demonstrate better cognition, daily function, and possibly neurophysiologic function than would be expected for their measured burden of disease. Going forward, we are creating a monthly “Resilience Working Group” meeting to bring together a critical mass of Center leaders and interested junior investigators to help articulate and advance this theme at UW. Our starting point is that we are expecting to work with quantitative and biologically-based measures of resilience, and living human participants. We are also interested in investigations rooted in our outstanding autopsy programs and biorepository. Learn more.
