Andrea Kwakowsky

speaker

106 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 28 Jun

Andrea Kwakowsky’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · The Internet of Animals · 28 Jun 2026 podcast

We know who carries the gene.

We know who will develop the disease.

So this makes the clinical trials slightly easier than the Alzheimer's trials, for example.

And there are worldwide initiatives, like it's called EnrollHD.

And people from multiple sides all around the world, they are part of this project and they can be enrolled in clinical trials.

So there are big developments in the field thanks to these initiatives.

It's very important to study post-mortem tissue from the people who have the disease, actually, because there are many preclinical studies, but the real molecular changes that occur in the human brain, they can be only studied with Huntington's disease cases.

And we study the molecular mechanisms of the disease, its progression in the brain.

Our main focus is finding drug targets and novel approaches, testing them, you know, like how we can modulate these pathways.

And in this case, the main focus of this study was neuroinflammation and understanding the differences of the inflammatory process between Huntington's disease patients with different symptom profiles.

There are slight differences, of course, but the main difference is really that people carry a different number of the repeats.

And this itself can lead to different symptom profiles, but also like where this mutant Huntington protein accumulates in the brain, it's different in every person.

Again, because Huntington's disease is a rare disease, very few places around the world, they are specifically focusing on collecting Huntington's disease brains.

And what is very important for our research, we have to know the clinical background information related to these cases.

So if we just got

a brain, you know, we know that the person had Huntington's disease and we don't have the information about the CAG repeat numbers, disease onset, and many other clinical characteristics, then we can't make all these conclusions what we were able to do now.

So I was sourcing the human brain tissue from the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank from the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

They have a really nice cohort of people involved in this project.

Many people will donate their brains.

Once they find out that they carried the mutation, they will sign up for the program.

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