Professor Marina Lynch

Preclinical: The primary interest of the research team is identification of the changes which occur in the aged brain, and in the brain of a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease, that lead to the well-described deficit in synaptic function. The emphasis is on the assessing the contribution of microglial activation to neuroinflammation and identifying the factor(s) that trigger microglial activation. Recent evidence has revealed that there is infiltration of peripheral immune cells into the brain which may occur as a consequence of the age-related and genotype-related increase in blood brain barrier permeability. The effect of these immune cells on resident cells in the brain is currently under investigation.
A small element of our work aims to identify a blood-based biomarker that is indicative of loss of cognitive function. This aspect of the work is in collaboration with Brian Lawlor and Ian Robertson. Recent evidence has indicated that monocyte-derived macrophages, prepared from a cohort of individuals whose memory performance in a recall task was poorer than predicted based on their IQ, exhibit an increased response to TLR agonists compared with control individuals. This finding and other more recent findings suggest a change in the inflammatory response of cells from individuals with MCI and AD and is being further investigated.