Researchers at UMass Chan Medical School are investigating the potential connection to and impact of long COVID on neurodegenerative disease, thanks to pilot grant funding from the PolyBio Research Foundation.
Rigel Chan, PhD, assistant professor of neurology; Elaine Lim, PhD, assistant professor of genomics & computational biology; and Fiachra Humphries, PhD, assistant professor of medicine, are the first UMass Chan recipients of a PolyBio Research Foundation award.
The basis of the research is determining the relationship between herpes virus infection and Alzheimer's disease. Drs. Chan and Lim are collaborating with Dr. Humphries, whose lab in the Division of Innate Immunity is working to identify new strategies for limiting viral replication and developing treatments for severe COVID-19.
“COVID is a serious illness, just like herpes virus is. It’s very aligned with our research, and we want to know if there are long-term neurological consequences of long COVID and what do those molecular consequences entail,” Lim said.
The group will use the same human cerebral organoid platform used in Chan and Lim’s herpes virus work to evaluate the role of COVID in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia.
“The interaction with Alzheimer's disease is a very intriguing question. We are looking at a very specific hypothesis and are working toward finding out if we infect a brain organoid with SARS-CoV-2, do we see the same Alzheimer’s disease signatures that we see for herpes virus infection,” Chan said.
“The brain organoid system gives us the ability to infect the platform and then tease out different cell types that are responding to the virus and are infected by the virus,” Humphries said. “It’s really exciting and it’s going to change how we think about long COVID and the effect that COVID infections have on the brain.”
The PolyBio Research Foundation award is for $250,000 over one year. The funding is part of a second phase of research and clinical trials through the LongCovid Research Consortium, a global scientific collaboration to rapidly and openly study core biological drivers of long COVID.
“In general, long COVID research is a very competitive field. We feel privileged and honored to be selected and funded by the consortium to do this research,” Chan said.
The UMass Chan scientists are also working in collaboration with Benjamin Readhead, research associate professor at the Arizona State University-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center. The group is advised by Katherine A. Fitzgerald, PhD, the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research Chair III, and professor of medicine at UMass Chan; and George Church, PhD, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School.
