Tau Pathology as a Contributor to Gulf War Illness and a Basis for Potential Therapy
Abstract
Gulf War Illness (GWI) is a debilitating disease suffered by at least 25 percent of the nearly 700,000 U.S. Veterans who were deployed during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. These Veterans have symptoms that include headaches, memory problems, pain, and fatigue. The disease is believed to be caused by exposure of the Veterans to chemicals that they encountered during the war, such as pesticides and nerve gas agents. The disease persists in the Veterans decades after exposure to these chemicals, with no relief of the symptoms. There is urgency in solving the mystery of how exposure to the chemicals could cause a long-lasting illness so that future episodes of this kind can be prevented. There is even greater urgency is designing effective medicines to treat the Veterans who are currently suffering from GWI, as they have been suffering for many years and their need is immediate, particularly as they age and become vulnerable to age related diseases, perhaps at a younger age than other individuals. Nerve cells in the brain are supported by little tubes called microtubules that form the architecture of the cell and also act like railroad tracks to move things around in the cell. Tau is a protein that decorates the microtubule and gives it some of its normal properties. Tau goes awry in many neurological diseases including Alzheimer?s disease, resulting in cognitive problems and memory deficits. It would not be at all surprising if tau were to go awry in GWI, thus accounting for some of the neurological problems suffered by these Veterans. Although cell studies using animal tissue did find alterations of tau when GW chemicals were added to dish, the problem with studying tau is that animal models are not a very good model because the tau in most animals is quite different from the tau in humans. Therefore the challenge is to find a way to study the role of tau in human nerve cells, so that a potential role for tau in GWI can be tested, particularly since no usable post-mortem brain bank cells currently exist for GWI research. To circumvent this problem, the current investigators from Drexel University and Boston University (who also work together on the Boston GWI consortium studies) have designed a repository bank of stem cells from veterans with GWI and healthy control GW Veterans for studies like the one proposed. The way the stem cells were created was to take a simple blood draw and use those blood cells from GW Veterans to conduct a multi-step procedure on them that turns them into stem cells. Now that the stem cell repository has been created by Drexel and Boston University investigators, the stem cells can be turned into all different types of cells that make up the brain. The proposed plan is to acquire these stem cells, differentiate them into different kinds of nerve cells of the brain, and then determine whether GW chemicals cause the tau in the neurons to go awry, and if so, whether the resulting symptoms can be reversed by medicines that might alleviate the problems with tau, and in turn, improve the health status of Veterans suffering from GWI.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 07, 2017
- Source ID
- W81XWH1710504
Entities
People
- Liang Qiang
Organizations
- Drexel University
- United States Army