The motivation driving the work of Pete Nelson, M.D., Ph.D., is personal. His grandmother, Sylvia Becker, died with Alzheimer's disease, and he says his mother then grew terrified of developing the disease.
"It gives me purpose in life to attack that," Nelson said. As an experimental neuropathologist at the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging, he is guided by that motivation. "It is most every researcher's dream to help identify and classify a disease, and then to go on and help beat it."
Nelson, who is the R.C. Durr Foundation Chair in Alzheimer's Disease at UK, accomplished the first part of that dream back in 2019, when a group of international researchers, co-chaired by Nelson, discovered a new form of dementia named limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, more commonly known as LATE.
Symptoms of LATE mimic Alzheimer's disease by causing memory loss and problems with thinking and reasoning in old age. But researchers found the LATE-affected brain looks very different from the Alzheimer's brain.
Now a couple of years after this discovery, Nelson is working towards the second part of the dream, with the world's first clinical trial for LATE officially underway by his colleagues at the University of Kentucky.
Greg Jicha, M.D., Ph.D., is director of clinical trials at Sanders-Brown and leader of one of the best clinical dementia teams in the country.
"Our collaboration with the basic scientists as always is key. We couldn't have done this without Dr. Nelson's discoveries," said Jicha. "For the first time ever, we are looking at folks participating in our research who we think are heading down the path of Alzheimer's, but now by checking simple blood tests and sometimes spinal fluid, we may be able to say while it looks like Alzheimer's symptomatically … it is actually LATE."
