A collaborative project studying the neurodegenerative effects of genetic cerebral palsy with the goal of finding a treatment for the disease is underway at the Barrow Neurological Institute thanks to a large grant the University of Arizona awarded in late July.
UA’s Valley Research Partnership awarded $530,000 in grants to 16 research projects across the Phoenix area. The cerebral palsy study received $80,000.
Michael Kruer, a physician, and Rita Sattler, a researcher, lead the project. Their labs work together, using Kruer’s collected samples to grow and study neurons in Sattler’s lab.
The goal of the project is to cultivate neurons from a healthy control group and compare them to the neurons of patients with cerebral palsy.
By exposing the brain cells to different antibodies and studying the proteins that the cells produce, the researchers hope to gain a better understanding of how cerebral palsy causes neurodegeneration.
These insights could help with the treatment of cerebral palsy.
“The big goal behind this is that if we can understand how these mutations lead to a degeneration of brain cells in cerebral palsy,” Sattler said. “If we know exactly what is going wrong on a cellular and molecular level, we can take the next step and develop a treatment or therapeutic.”
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She explained that if the project can pinpoint a certain protein causing neurons to die, the researchers can reach out to chemists and pharmaceutical companies to design a chemical that blocks the damaging protein.
Sattler’s lab employs ASU undergraduate students as well as graduate and post-doctoral professionals. Ileana Lorenzini followed Sattler from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The experiment is a labor- and cost-intensive endeavor as the cells need constant monitoring and materials are expensive. But Sattler has big plans for the future. She hopes that these preliminary studies will produce enough data to continue the study on a larger scale, hopefully with funding from an agency like the National Institute of Health.
“We want to make this into a larger grant proposal and a larger study,” Sattler said.
Contact the reporter at rebecca.spiess@asu.edu.
