UT research to study protein’s role in Alzheimer’s

Associate Professor Francisco Barrera is a co-investigator on new research funded by the National Institutes of Health into the role certain brain proteins may play in Alzheimer’s disease. 

“The discoveries we expect will not only guide pharmaceutical companies on how to design new drugs for Alzheimer’s, but they also have the potential to lead to drugs that prevent cancer metastasis,” Barrera said. 

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is part of a four-year, $3.3 million research project (R01) grant with collaborators at Case Western Reserve University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and Texas Tech University.

A member of the UT Department of Biochemistry and Cellular and Molecular Biology, Barrera’s previous research already has yielded key information on the EphA2 receptor, a lipid membrane gatekeeper. 

“The EphA2 controls multiple facets of how cells move, in healthy conditions but also different pathologies,” he said. Failure of the EphA2 receptor is believed to contribute to the severity of Alzheimer’s disease. 

“The EphA2 receptor controls the ability of a cell to grab on neighboring cells,” Barrera explained. “We measure how EphA2 controls cell migration.” Using antibody molecules that bind only to active EphA2, the researchers study how human cells move across a filter and count the number of cells migrating.

In the five years since he joined UT, the Barrera Lab has been funded by several NIH grants, totaling about $3.7 million.

“EphA2 has a highly complex way of operating, more so than similar proteins,” Barrera said. “The study to unravel how EphA2 works is bound to yield surprising findings, which is often what leads to groundbreaking discoveries.”