On Feb. 7, 2025, the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV celebrated the arrival of the Department of Brain Health with the “Brain Health Frontiers: Tackling Alzheimer's Together” panel discussion. Attendees were not only treated to an introduction to the department and its team, but were also given a glimpse into the groundbreaking research they are doing when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease.
The panel – with Mark Guadagnoli, Ph.D, senior associate dean for faculty affairs and director of learning and performance, as the emcee – consisted of Dr. Marc J. Kahn, dean of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine and vice president for health affairs at UNLV; Jefferson W. Kinney, Ph.D., founding chair and the Reg Grundy and Joy Chambers-Grundy chair for brain health and co-director of the Pam Quirk Brain Health and Biomarker Laboratory; Dr. Kate Zhong, director of innovation; Dr. Jeffrey L. Cummings, director of the Chambers-Grundy Center for Transformative Neuroscience and co-director of the Pam Quirk Brain Health and Biomarker Laboratory.
“I truly believe that neuroscience that succeeds transforms lives. It’s therapeutic, it intervenes in the diseases that everyone knows someone who has. Transformative neuroscience and our center is devoted to the development of therapeutics, and we have some unique approaches to doing that,” says Cummings regarding the name of the Chambers-Grundy Center for Transformative Neuroscience (CGC-TN).
Within the CGC-TN, there are five main areas: the clinical trial observatory, the biomarker observatory, the biomarker laboratory, the innovation incubator, and the learning & teaching collaboratory. It’s within these areas that the brain health team is working on research that aids in the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
The clinical trial observatory is a database that extracts its information from the federal registry for clinical trials. “We follow the universe of drugs that are moving through the pipeline and some of them are going to become successful therapies for Alzheimer’s disease,” states Cummings.
The observatory produces a publication annually that provides updates on the Alzheimer’s disease drug development pipeline, allowing this data to easily be interpreted and used to inform drug development programs.
A significant development in Alzheimer’s disease involves the use of biomarkers to track the disease before the first symptoms begin to appear. These biomarkers are studied within the CGC-TN’s biomarker observatory and the biomarker laboratory.
“... with the development of the biomarker, we started to see the protein in the brain … we’re moving from not only treatment, but detection and now we are really looking at prevention,” says Zhong.
Cummings adds, “... we can detect the people that have it in the brain before they have any symptoms, and we can do it with a blood test. That sets the stage for our being able to prevent it by the early administration of therapeutics. We’re looking at a whole different way of thinking about brain disorders because we can see them before they have caused the damage to the person’s ability to function.”
“... there’s one biomarker that is currently being considered by [the] FDA [Food and Drug Administration] as a screening tool, and, in fact, some of the data for that FDA application came from the Pam Quirk lab. We were one of three sites that contributed data for this,” says Kinney. “We have a couple of biomarkers that we think are better, and we’re developing these ourselves, that as far as I know, no one else is working on.”
The panelists delve deeper into new insights when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease, such as how inflammation may play a significant role in Alzheimer’s and many other diseases and how lifestyle changes – like implementing the six pillars of brain health (being social, engaging your brain, managing stress, exercising, sleeping, and eating right) – can benefit your brain’s health, which you can learn more about by watching the full event livestream.
Overall, the transition of the department of brain health to the school of medicine benefits the department’s research goals.
Kinney states, “We’ve been successful in what we’re doing because our expertise is complementary and not duplicative. And that really has been our strength, but it’s also why our move to the school of medicine is unbelievably powerful. Because now, there are opportunities to interact with the strength here that we had not had that will only expand on what we’re doing.”
The arrival of the department also allows the school to expand on the various resources it can provide to the community.
Dean Kahn says, “We have … some world-class researchers in cognitive disorders and neuroscience, and what we want to do in the school of medicine is build upon that. We want to hire some more scientists and we want to build out our clinical services, so that we can lead this region in the care of things, such as stroke, epilepsy, neurocognitive disorders, and the others.”
Watch the event recap below!
