Darren Saunders

speaker

165 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2016 last heard Sep 2016

Darren Saunders’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Health Report · Ubiquitous proteins, empty noses · 18 Jul 2016 podcast

So that's in things like Alzheimer's disease and motor neuron disease.

colleague Justin Yobri, down at the University of Wollongong, and also Carapero, who's another scientist at the University of Wollongong.

So the three of us have been putting our heads together on this problem for a while.

And it turns out that we've probably got the flip side of the coin happening in neurodegeneration.

So in diseases like motor neuron disease, nerve cells start to die, and they start to die along with accumulating these great big sort of clumps of misfolded protein.

Inside the cell.

And those big clumps seem to soak up all of this ubiquitin tag because the cell's trying to deal with all this misfolded protein.

And we think that that then stops the cells from being able to function properly.

Now, the really interesting thing is in cancer for years, you know, we've been trying to understand this system as a way to try and kill cells.

And now we've got to flip this on our head.

And from my perspective, this has been quite challenging to flip it on our head and try and save cells now.

We're trying to keep them alive to stop them dying because that's what causes the progression.

Of the disease.

And so you've got to sort of think about things differently.

And so I've had to learn an awful lot from a neuroscience perspective.

And the guys that I work with in neuroscience are having to think about things differently in a cancer perspective.

And so there's a really nice cross-fertilization of sort of concepts and frameworks and ideas going on.

So we and a lot of other people have found very good evidence that this ubiquitin tag is in all of these clumps of protein in dying brain cells, in dying neurons.

And we're looking at a lot of evidence to understand how fast that happens and the sort of dynamics behind it.

What we're chasing after at the moment is to see whether or not we can give cells back that capacity to switch that system back on and see if that keeps the cells alive for longer.

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