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[Title card animation: Dementia Australia Research Foundation - Treat]
[Dr Karissa Barthelson, Flinders University]
Dr Karissa: I am Dr Karissa Barthelson. I'm a Race Against Dementia, Dementia Australia Research Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship based at Flinders University here in South Australia. My interest in dementia really peaked in my honours’ year at university. I was working on a really specific aspect of the genetics of Alzheimer's disease, the most common type of dementia. And once I was really understanding the scale of the problem, I decided I wanted to dedicate my career to trying to find a cure, or even something that's a preventative treatment that could at least slow the cognitive decline.
Typically, we think of Alzheimer's disease as a disease for the elderly, and we also can hear of people who are showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in their thirties, but also, children can live with diseases similar to Alzheimer's disease. In childhood dementia, a lot of the symptoms that the children will display are very similar to what is seen in adult onset dementias like Alzheimer's disease, mainly the progressive cognitive decline.
In my research, I want to look very closely at these common problems that happen between Alzheimer's disease and a type of childhood dementia called Sanfilippo syndrome. Because I think if there's some common problems, there could be some potential common solutions, and we can look and see whether there are drugs that could be therapeutic for both diseases. We, as humans, need to eat food to survive, and the acids in our stomach will break down our food into the smaller building blocks to then go on and fuel our bodies. Our cells have a similar system. They have their own little stomachs that are called the lysosome, and there's some evidence that in Alzheimer's disease, the little cellular stomachs don't get as acidic as they should be.
Before we start giving drugs to people who live with dementia, we need to first see if they work. Traditionally, we do this by first testing in vitro, meaning cells in a dish. And if it seems to be working in vitro, then we move on to in vivo, so this means in a living animal. So, zebrafish are an increasingly popular species of animal that we use for scientific research. At the DNA level, zebrafish are about 70% similar to humans. This means we can do all of our drug testing in zebrafish to get an idea of whether the drug is doing what we think it's going to do before we move on to a mouse model.
If this is a common problem between Alzheimer's and Sanfilippo, I have some ideas of how we can correct this process, and then we could have a drug that could be beneficial for both types of diseases, and this is really exciting as we can have a much wider benefit for more people who live with these diseases. So, while these drugs may not be a cure for these diseases, it may at least slow down the progression and give us more years with our loved ones. So, this post-doctoral fellowship from the Dementia Australia Research Foundation and Race Against Dementia is my first ever fellowship and my first grant, I was completely over the moon when I found out that I received the funding, and this has really cemented my place as an early career researcher in the dementia field.
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This research is supported by:
Race Against Dementia - Dementia Australia Research Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Flinders University
The University of Adelaide
Dr Barthelson would like to acknowledge:
The research team (Professor Kim Hemsley, Professor Ralph Martins AO and Dr Nicholas JC Smith, and the Alzheimer's disease Genetics Laboratory (Associate Professor Michael Lardelli, Ewan Gerken, Lachie Baer, Angel Allen and Yoshi Tan)
We thank Sir Jackie Stewart OBE and Race Against Dementia for their support.
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[Title card]
Dementia Australia Research Foundation:
A cure is just the beginning
If you would like to see dementia research make real impact, donate today:
1300 636 679
www.dementia.org.au/donate-research
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