Looking to establish a causal link between air pollution and neurodegeneration, researchers from the Francis Crick Institute and University College London (UCL) have established a project called Role of Air Pollution in Dementia (RAPID). The project will examine the effect of pollutant particles on the immune response of the body and subsequent development of disease.
While it remains unclear how particulate matter alters someone’s risk and drives progression of neurodegenerative disease, air pollution is a known risk factor in several diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s diseases and cancer. Epidemiological studies have shown an increased proportion of small particle pollutants in the air is associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
This new study will build on work carried out in the Crick’s Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory. During 2022 their work showed how air pollution can cause lung cancer in people who had never smoked. The research showed how tiny pollution particles caused inflammation in the lungs, which in turn triggered dormant mutations leading to the development of lung cancer.
“We want to tackle a major societal challenge – how the environment, specifically the air we breathe, affects the brain and underpins the onset and progression of dementia. We now have the necessary scientific tools and approaches to address this question,” said Imran Noorani, postdoctoral clinical fellow at the Crick and Clinical Lecturer in Neurosurgery at UCL.
Focusing on particles known as PM2.5 which are around 3% of the width of a human hair, researchers will work to understand if these particles induce a brain-tissue-specific immune response in mice, and what effect the inflammation has on glial cells in the brain. They will study how these cells react, and if pollution-related inflammation triggers mechanisms that accelerate characteristics of neurodegeneration, including protein misfolding and aggregation and damage to neurons.
Until now a major gap in the understanding of neurodegenerative diseases has been how the environment can trigger or drive pathology. This has been a difficult challenge to model and study in depth. The researchers hope that, by discovering the ways in which pollution particles affect the brain, they can hope to offer alternative approaches that may ultimately modify the environmental risk of developing brain diseases.
Charlie Swanton, Crick's deputy clinical director and Head of the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory at the Crick and UCL said: “Our ambitious programme adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, bringing together expertise from different scientific and clinical areas. We are aiming to unravel how genetic risk interacts with our environment.”
Swanton said the work in lung cancer has helped shine a light on how air pollution-induced inflammation drives tumourigenesis, and now the researchers want to test the hypothesis that similar inflammatory processes, from the air we breathe, drive the earliest stages of neurogenerative diseases.
The RAPID project is funded by Race Against Dementia, a charity founded by Sir Jackie Stuart, three-time Formula-1 World Champion, in partnership with medical research charity Rosetrees.
Further reading:
Visit Blog