Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Director of the Precision Immunology Institute at Mount Sinai in New-York is an expert of tissue-resident immune cells. Here she highlights her discovery of the role of tissue-resident macrophages in Alzheimer’s disease.
Transcript:
So macrophages are absolutely key. A good example of that -and we are going to go back to cancer if you want but- a good example is Alzheimer’s disease, which is now well understood as being a disease of these tissue-resident macrophages – the microglia – that you mentioned earlier. Those are macrophages, and my lab has shown that they arise locally – absolutely not dependent on monocytes. In fact, they are shielded from the circulation, and they develop in the brain, throughout the lifespan of an animal, and likely human also. And we believe that when this pool is exhausted, then there is probably a reduced ability to clear those damaged neurons and this may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.