BME’s Jingjing Gao Awarded Grant from Alzheimer’s Association

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Jingjing Gao

About seven million Americans, aged 65 and older, are currently living with Alzheimer’s dementia. That’s roughly one in nine people in that age group, and this number is projected to nearly double to 13 million by 2050 if no breakthrough prevention or cure emerges. 

To meet this challenge, Assistant Professor Jingjing Gao of the UMass Amherst Biomedical Engineering (BME) Department has received an award of $200,000 over three years from the Alzheimer’s Association International Research Grant program (IRGP) to support her research into a novel Alzheimer’s treatment.  

Gao, who is also an adjunct assistant professor in the UMass Amherst Chemistry Department, is the principal investigator of the Gao Research Group. As she explains, “Working at the interface of material science, chemistry, biology, and biomedical engineering, we aim to promote healthy aging with a materials-centric approach, to innovate the treatments for degenerative diseases. Our research focuses on translational strategies to develop gene therapies for neurological disorders or chronic diseases.”

The Alzheimer's Association IRGP program funds investigations to advance our understanding of Alzheimer's disease, identify new treatment strategies, improve care for people with dementia, and further our knowledge of brain health and disease prevention.

Gao’s newly funded project takes aim at one of the brain’s most important defense systems: microglia. These immune cells serve to clear away harmful debris and help maintain a healthy environment. But in Alzheimer’s, microglia often lose their protective abilities, allowing damaging plaques to accumulate. 

Gao is specifically targeting the microglial protein TREM2. According to Gao, “TREM2 (triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2) has been shown to control key microglial functions, such as phagocytosis, migration, lipid processing, proliferation, lysosomal degradation, and metabolism. Whole genome sequencing studies have identified loss-of-function variants in TREM2 that confer a considerably increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in humans.”

While previous approaches have targeted TREM2, they have mainly relied on intracerebral injection or transgenic technology, which face major hurdles when it comes to clinical translation, including high production cost, immune and inflammatory reactions, and genotoxicity. Therefore, as Gao explains: “we propose a non-invasive, non-viral approach that delivers TREM2 messenger RNA to the brain through the nose-to-brain route using tiny lipid nanoparticles.”

Gao and her team will formulate and test several lipid nanoparticle delivery platforms, with the aim of identifying a sustained, effective intranasal TREM2 mRNA delivery system—a strategy that, Gao concludes, “has the potential to restore microglial function, slow disease progression, and open the door to safer, more effective therapies for Alzheimer’s.”

Gao earned her B.S. from South-Central Minzu University in China and her M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Shanghai JiaoTong University in China before earning her Ph.D. in Chemistry from UMass Amherst, where she cultivated expertise in synthesizing intelligent nanomaterials to achieve targeted drug delivery. 

She also completed postdoctoral research at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she focused on translational research of medical devices and drug delivery platforms for neurological disorders. 

The Alzheimer’s Association International Research Grant program is highly competitive and global in scope, funding investigators in more than 40 countries. These awards are designed to encourage high-risk, high-reward projects that could open new frontiers in dementia research. Since awarding their first grants in 1982, the Association has grown into the largest private, nonprofit funder of Alzheimer's research.