The holder of a master’s degree and a PhD from MIT, Jean-Jacques Degroof was a fellow at its Sloan School of Management. A venture investor and teacher, Jean-Jacques Degroof supports MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative and research connected to Alzheimer’s disease. In May 2018, MIT neuroscientists published a study about the role of the APOE4 gene in Alzheimer’s. APOE is a gene that comes in three variants: 2, 3, and 4. For a long time, the APOE4 variant had been linked to late-onset Alzheimer’s, with people with the gene recording a higher risk of developing the disease. In fact, it has been documented that APOE4 is three times more prevalent in patients with Alzheimer’s than in the rest of the population. Despite the link between the gene and the disease, the causative role for this relationship was unknown. The study by MIT neuroscientists sought to shed light on this link. Researchers stimulated stem cells extracted from human skin to create three different brain cells: neurons, microglia, and astrocytes. They then edited the human-derived stem cells’ genes to convert APOE3 into APOE4. The results were studied for their differences. Researchers discovered that cells with APOE4 differed from those with APOE3 in gene expressions. These changes resulted in differentiated cell behavior. For example, neurons with APOE4 secreted more amyloid proteins, astrocytes with APOE4 produced two times more cholesterol than those with APOE3, and microglia, which function to remove foreign matter and amyloid proteins, were significantly slower when APOE4 was present. All these contribute to a higher risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
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