How one College of Medicine researcher is unlocking Alzheimer’s disease

Ian Murray, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Experimental Therapeutics at the Texas A&M Health Science Center (TAMHSC) College of Medicine in Bryan, is not your typical research scientist.

Hailing from the Caribbean island of Trinidad, his smile is perennial and a chuckle follows his every sentence. He is happy to invite visitors into his lab and always makes time for the college’s service activities like leading a TAMHSC team for the Alzheimer’s Association Houston and Southeast Texas Chapter Memory Walk in November 2010.

His job is not easy. He has chosen to tackle the inner workings of Alzheimer’s disease, and unlocking the pathology of such a disease is not without challenges.  It requires a special kind of resilient patience and an ebullient personality.  That’s where Dr. Murray comes in.

“Alzheimer’s is a ravaging, debilitating disease,” Murray says.  “That’s why we focus on earlier identification and very early drug discovery in the hopes that fewer people will suffer.”

The numbers are staggering.  According to a 2011 report issued by the Alzheimer’s Association, an estimated 5.4 million people have Alzheimer’s disease and the cost tops $183 billion a year. Those costs are expected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2050, making early diagnosis, prevention and finding a cure all the more imperative. Dr. Murray’s research strives to do just that.

It starts earlier than you think

Even though its symptoms are associated with old age, Alzheimer’s disease is thought to start years or even decades prior to clinical diagnosis. In fact, the common metabolic maladies of middle age—high cholesterol, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity and diabetes—all increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease manifesting later in life. 

You may have heard that correlation before, however, research now demonstrates that direct metabolic inhibition increases Alzheimer’s pathology in animal models.  In other words, when your normal metabolic processes go awry, it’s like opening the door for Alzheimer’s disease. Murray is zeroing in on this premise to determine if it is, in fact, one of several “causes” of Alzheimer’s disease.

He recently summarized the role of metabolic diseases and their treatment in “Vascular and metabolic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease,” a review to be published soon in the Journal of Experimental Biology and Medicine.

In essence, if you can prevent the disease earlier by simply reducing metabolic risk factors (diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity), you can reduce the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease.

“The field of Alzheimer’s disease is similar to that of heart attacks decades ago,” Murray says.   “You had a heart attack, there was severe damage, and you died.”  “That’s not the case with the cardiovascular field now” , he continues, “there are early diagnostic tools, early prevention and drugs”. “Alzheimer’s disease research and treatment is moving in a similar direction, with the development of early detection tools. However, preventative drugs and a cure are still on the horizon.”

The evolution of a scientist

Before joining the TAMHSC College of Medicine in 2007, Murray earned a bachelor’s of science in Biology at the University of Waterloo and his Ph.D. in Physiology at McGill University in Canada. 

He then received postdoctoral training in the world-renowned Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research at the University of Pennsylvania under Drs. Virginia Lee and John Trojanowski.  There, Murray was the first to identify amino acid sequences that initiate pathological misfolding of a protein involved in Parkinson’s disease. 

He honed his biophysical training with measurement of protein misfolding with Dr. Paul Axelsen and later obtained further mass spectrometry training in the world-renowned laboratory of Dr. Ian Blair, also at the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout his training, his research spanned disciplines from protein folding and mass spectrometry to obesity and diseases of aging, thus forming his expertise in sophisticated equipment, diseases of aging and metabolism.

The result of such a diverse training is Murray’s hallmark: a multidisciplinary approach to diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Currently, he and his team are exploring the cause, effect and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

Murray breaks down cause and effect like this:

“While everyone produces the proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease, not everyone gets the disease,” he says. “In the lab, we are identifying several triggers for this conversion of the protein to its more toxic form that causes Alzheimer’s.”

Once those proteins are converted, oxidative stress and the generation of free radicals herald the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. “Think of it as a ‘rusting of the brain,’” Murray explains.

In terms of treatment, Murray is exploring potential markers which may allow for earlier identification of Alzheimer’s disease. His is one of the few labs to operate a specialized and dedicated mass spectrometer for such studies.  Murray has also tested several drugs to determine if they could prevent that characteristic protein misfolding involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

From the bench to the café—and beyond

Since his arrival in 2007, Murray has significantly contributed to the education of students.  Six  undergraduates from his lab have graduated and since gone on to medical, dental or graduate school. He also lectures on histology (the study of the microscopic anatomy of cells and tissues of animals) to the first-year medical students at TAMHSC and on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to graduate students.

When he’s not in the lab, Murray is constantly in motion.  He constantly reaches out to the community to educate on Alzheimer’s disease. He has been interviewed by journalists for his expertise for seminal publications in the field of Alzheimer’s disease.  He also served on an expert panel for a public presentation and discussion of the HBO-produced Alzheimer’s series in 2009.

Additionally, Murray organized the poster session for Texas Brain and Spine Institute Symposiums in 2009 and 2010. In 2010 he organized the TAMHSC group for the Alzheimer’s Association Memory Walk.  

He even organizes a monthly discussion forum, “Coffee Talk: Forget the Milk and Cream, Just Spill the Beans” that brings socially relevant scientific topics to the public in an easy to understand way.  The expert panelists are most often professors from the Texas A&M Health Science Center or Texas A&M University.

“These various ways of outreach  are my way of sharing what happens in the lab with the community,” he says. “As a scientist, one has to be an ambassador, portraying research accurately not only to students but to the public as well. It is only this way that society learns of contributions of science in general and from Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M Health Science Center, to research, medicine and indeed their daily lives.”

“You know, we can only do so much in a lab,” Murray says.  “We’ve got to interact with people because those are potentially the lives we’re trying to save.”