Ricerc@Sapienza

The absence of early diagnostic biomarkers for Alzheimer¿s disease (AD), the most common form of dementia, allows the disease to progress until irreversible declines in cognitive functions and memory are detected. It is therefore imperative to develop early, non-invasive, and easily accessible diagnostic tools.
Due to the limited availability of samples and the obvious limitations of interventions in human subjects, it is very difficult to establish the time course of the progression of the disease, thus various mouse models have been employed to unravel the pathophysiology of AD.
The present project, RELIEVE, will take advantage of the observations that vision is early impaired in patients with AD and in mouse models of AD.
RELIEVE will investigate retinal biomarkers by analyzing retina, and olfactory epithelium in a mouse model starting from young, pre-symptomatic mice. We will investigate the appearance of AD signs as neurodegeneration, intracellular and extracellular protein aggregates, and neuroinflammation, along the disease progression using the 3xTg-AD mouse model bearing the human mutations in the genes encoding presenilin 1 (PS1M146V), amyloid precursor protein (APPSwe), and tau (MAPTP301L) which recapitulates most of the AD characteristics.
Data obtained in the RELIEVE project will pave the road for the development of new advanced cellular and microscopy techniques for the early diagnosis of AD.