About the project
The project matches the third sustainable development goal from the United Nations: “Ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages” as it aims to identify novel mechanism that may explain the link between obesity/diabetes and Alzheimer’s diseases and can be targeted in the combat against Alzheimer’s diseases.
For decades, research on Alzheimer´s disease has focused on amyloid plaques and means to prevent their formation. Despite the recent introduction of amyloid antibodies to the market as disease modifying drugs, the focus on amyloid therapies has not led to a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. Hence, new or additional approaches are needed. Lipid dysregulation has been reported in Alzheimer’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease shares risk factors and brain pathologies with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Therefore, Alzheimer’s disease has been referred to as “brain diabetes”. Diabetes and intake of energy-dense diets lead to elevated levels of fatty acids; in peripheral organs this contributes to insulin resistance, accumulation of neutral lipids in lipid droplets, and lipotoxicity. Lipid droplets are also present in the brain, but what are their roles in brain cells?
Within this project, we aim to determine how the dynamics of lipid droplets are regulated in brain cells. We also aim to determine the functional roles of this organelle in Alzheimer’s disease and whether dysregulation of cerebral lipid droplets is a mechanistic link between type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.
LIPIDBRAIN received funding for three PhD positions funded by the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Oslo and started in 2022.
LIPIDBRAIN is led by Professor Cecilie Morland at the Department of Pharmacy in collaboration with an interdisciplinary group of pharmacists, nutritional scientists, neurophysiologists, biologists, and medical doctors at the University of Oslo, and the University of Illinois Chicago, USA.