Publications by authors named "Eric B Dammer"

C9orf72-associated amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (c9ALS) is caused by an intronic GC repeat expansion that leads to toxic RNA transcripts and dipeptide repeat proteins (DPRs). A clinical trial using the antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) BIIB078 to target these transcripts was discontinued after failing to provide clinical benefit. Here, we determine the extent of target engagement in the central nervous system (CNS) and elucidate pharmacodynamic cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers following treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Almost all individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) develop Alzheimer's disease (AD) by mid to late life. However, the degree to which AD in DS shares pathological changes with sporadic late-onset AD (LOAD) and autosomal dominant AD (ADAD) beyond core AD biomarkers such as amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau is unknown. Here, we used proteomics of cerebrospinal fluid from individuals with DS (n = 229) in the Down Alzheimer Barcelona Neuroimaging Initiative (DABNI) cohort to assess the evolution of AD pathophysiology from asymptomatic to dementia stages and compared the proteomic biomarker changes in DS to those observed in LOAD and ADAD.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Tauopathies, including Alzheimer's disease and FTLD-tau, are neurodegenerative disorders with no effective treatments, and this research links them to impaired glycogen metabolism in both fruit fly models and humans.
  • Breaking down neuronal glycogen in these models improves tauopathy symptoms by redirecting glucose to beneficial pathways and reducing oxidative stress.
  • The study suggests that dietary restriction enhances glycogen breakdown, potentially mitigating tau-related issues and indicating glycogen metabolism as a promising target for future therapies in tauopathies and neurodegenerative diseases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Chronic neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration are critical but unresolved drivers of disability accumulation in progressive multiple sclerosis (MS). Chronic active white matter lesions (CAL), identifiable radiologically as paramagnetic rim lesions (PRL), indicate progression-relevant chronic neuroinflammation. Using single-cell transcriptomics (scRNAseq) and T-cell receptor sequencing (scTCR-seq), we profiled cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and blood immune cells of 34 radiologically characterized adults with MS (17 untreated, 6 treated with B-cell-depletion) and 5 healthy controls.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

TDP-43 pathology is a defining feature of Limbic-Predominant Age-Related TDP-43 Encephalopathy neuropathologic change (LATE-NC) and is frequently comorbid with Alzheimer's disease neuropathologic change (ADNC). However, the molecular consequences of co-occurring LATE-NC and ADNC pathology (TDP-43, β-amyloid, and tau protein pathologies) remain unclear. Here, we conducted a comparative biochemical, molecular, and proteomic analysis of hippocampal tissue from 90 individuals spanning control, LATE-NC, ADNC, and ADNC+LATE-NC groups to assess the impact of cryptic exon (CE) inclusion, phosphorylated TDP-43 pathology (pTDP-43), and AD-related pathologies (β-amyloid, and tau) on the proteome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The pathophysiological mechanisms driving disease progression of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and corresponding biomarkers are not fully understood. Here we leveraged aptamer-based proteomics (>4,000 proteins) to identify dysregulated communities of co-expressed cerebrospinal fluid proteins in 116 adults carrying autosomal dominant FTLD mutations (C9orf72, GRN and MAPT) compared with 39 non-carrier controls. Network analysis identified 31 protein co-expression modules.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a neurodegenerative disease involving loss of motor neurons, typically results in death within 3-5 years of disease onset. Although roughly 10% of cases can be linked to a specific inherited mutation (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterized by significant clinical and molecular heterogeneity, influenced by genetic and demographic factors. Using an unbiased, network-driven approach, we analyzed the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) proteome from 431 individuals (483 samples), including 111 African American participants, to identify core protein modules associated with AD, race, sex, and age. Our analysis revealed ten co-expression modules linked to distinct biological pathways and cell types, many of which correlated with established AD biomarkers such as β-amyloid, tau, and phosphorylated tau.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Parkinson's disease (PD) starts decades before symptoms appear, usually in the later decades of life, when age-related changes are occurring. To identify molecular changes early in the disease course and distinguish PD pathologies from aging, we generated Drosophila expressing alpha-synuclein (αSyn) in neurons and performed longitudinal bulk transcriptomics and proteomics on brains at six time points across the lifespan and compared the data to healthy control flies as well as human post-mortem brain datasets. We found that translational and energy metabolism pathways were downregulated in αSyn flies at the earliest timepoints; comparison with the aged control flies suggests that elevated αSyn accelerates changes associated with normal aging.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Deep molecular phenotyping of cells at transcriptomic and proteomic levels is an essential first step to understanding cellular contributions to development, aging, injury, and disease. Since proteome and transcriptome level abundances only modestly correlate with each other, complementary profiling of both is needed. We report a novel method called simultaneous protein and RNA -omics (SPARO) to capture the cell type-specific transcriptome and proteome simultaneously from both in vitro and in vivo experimental model systems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other tauopathies, tau dissociates from microtubules and forms toxic aggregates that contribute to neurodegeneration. Although some of the pathological interactions of tau have been identified from postmortem brain tissue, these studies are limited by their inability to capture transient interactions. To investigate the interactome of aggregate-prone fragments of tau, we applied an proximity labeling technique using split TurboID biotin ligase (sTurbo) fused with the tau microtubule repeat domain (TauRD), a core region implicated in tau aggregation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is a complex and aggressive cancer type marked by significant molecular diversity, challenging current treatment efforts.
  • This study analyzed four mRNA subtypes—immunoreactive, differentiated, proliferative, and mesenchymal—focusing on their gene expression profiles, immune microenvironment, and connections to clinical traits like survival and age.
  • Key findings showed that the immunoreactive subtype had high immune cell infiltration linked to better immune responses, while the proliferative subtype was associated with growth and cancer progression, highlighting the need for subtype-specific treatment strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease, yet our comprehension predominantly relies on studies within non-Hispanic White (NHW) populations. Here we provide an extensive survey of the proteomic landscape of AD across diverse racial/ethnic groups.

Methods: Two cortical regions, from multiple centers, were harmonized by uniform neuropathological diagnosis.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The study successfully enriched HBPs from plasma samples of AD patients and controls, identifying 2865 proteins and observing correlations between specific plasma proteins and AD brain biomarkers, revealing complex relationships between blood and brain changes.
  • * Key plasma proteins that showed elevated levels in AD, including SMOC1 and APOE4, could effectively distinguish AD from controls, with a 0.85 accuracy, and when combined with plasma pTau181, enhanced diagnostic capability.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Multi-omics studies in Alzheimer's disease (AD) revealed many potential disease pathways and therapeutic targets. Despite their promise of precision medicine, these studies lacked Black Americans (BA) and Latin Americans (LA), who are disproportionately affected by AD.

Methods: To bridge this gap, Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Alzheimer's Disease (AMP-AD) expanded brain multi-omics profiling to multi-ethnic donors.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study analyzed serum proteins in 5,127 older Icelandic adults to gain insights into the molecular processes of late-onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD) over nearly 13 years.
  • Researchers identified 303 proteins linked to incident LOAD, with over 40% showing independent associations from the APOE-ε4 gene variant, indicating involvement in neuronal functions.
  • Four proteins were found to be downregulated by APOE-ε4 but upregulated in LOAD, suggesting they may reflect a biological response to the onset of the disease, highlighting dysregulated processes early in LOAD development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex neurodegenerative disorder that develops over decades. AD brain proteomics reveals vast alterations in protein levels and numerous altered biologic pathways. Here, we compare AD brain proteome and network changes with the brain proteomes of amyloid β (Aβ)-depositing mice to identify conserved and divergent protein networks with the conserved networks identifying an Aβ amyloid responsome.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Lewy body dementia (LBD), a class of disorders comprising Parkinson's disease dementia (PDD) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), features substantial clinical and pathological overlap with Alzheimer's disease (AD). The identification of biomarkers unique to LBD pathophysiology could meaningfully advance its diagnosis, monitoring, and treatment. Using quantitative mass spectrometry (MS), we measured over 9,000 proteins across 138 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) tissues from a University of Pennsylvania autopsy collection comprising control, Parkinson's disease (PD), PDD, and DLB diagnoses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: To define tauopathy-associated changes in the human gray and white matter proteome.

Method: We applied tandem mass tagged labeling and mass spectrometry, consensus, and ratio weighted gene correlation network analysis (WGCNA) to gray and white matter sampled from postmortem human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The sampled tissues included control as well as Alzheimer's disease, corticobasal degeneration, progressive supranuclear palsy, frontotemporal degeneration with tau pathology, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is currently defined by the aggregation of amyloid-β (Aβ) and tau proteins in the brain. Although biofluid biomarkers are available to measure Aβ and tau pathology, few markers are available to measure the complex pathophysiology that is associated with these two cardinal neuropathologies. Here, we characterized the proteomic landscape of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) changes associated with Aβ and tau pathology in 300 individuals using two different proteomic technologies-tandem mass tag mass spectrometry and SomaScan.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Repetitive mild traumatic brain injuries (rmTBI) sustained within a window of vulnerability can result in long term cognitive deficits, depression, and eventual neurodegeneration associated with tau pathology, amyloid beta (Aβ) plaques, gliosis, and neuronal and functional loss. However, a comprehensive study relating acute changes in immune signaling and glial reactivity to neuronal changes and pathological markers after single and repetitive mTBIs is currently lacking. In the current study, we addressed the question of how repeated injuries affect the brain neuroimmune response in the acute phase of injury (< 24 h) by exposing the 3xTg-AD mouse model of tau and Aβ pathology to successive (1x-5x) once-daily weight drop closed-head injuries and quantifying immune markers, pathological markers, and transcriptional profiles at 30 min, 4 h, and 24 h after each injury.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF