TREND
The team focuses on certain neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, known as tauopathies.
These diseases are characterized by the aggregation of misconformed tau proteins in different cells present in various regions of the brain. In addition to Alzheimer's disease, tauopathies include progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), corticobasal degeneration, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, and a subset of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD-MAPT).
The team identified new molecular species of pathological tau proteins and new mechanisms of pathology propagation in the brain (via extracellular vesicles). In these neurodegenerative diseases, the team was able to show that neurons are not the only cells affected; they interact with glial cells (astrocyte, microglia and oligodendrocyte) for example through purinergic signaling and these interactions can be modulated. Some of our results have been patented and used to develop translational approaches with several clinicians in the team but also industrial partners.
These approaches range from the development/validation of new diagnostic and therapeutic tools (pharmacology, gene therapy, immunotherapy) to clinical trials. Although work has historically focused on tau protein in neurodegenerative diseases, the Alzheimer & Tauopathies team has discovered several other physiological functions of tau in non-neuronal cells, with results in the field of cancer (nuclear functions, response to anticancer agents damaging DNA...) and metabolism (glucose metabolism, function of pancreatic islet β cells in mice...).
The old Alzheimer & Tauopathies team is moving towards increasingly translational research. We chose to display it through a new name for the team. From 2026, it will be called TREND for “Translational REsearch laboratory on NeuroDegeneration”.