New study explores inflammation and the brain

Dr Lola Mugisho has been granted $1.8 million for new research exploring the role of inflammation in brain conditions, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

The Buchanan Charitable Foundation has funded Mugisho’s team to spend the next five years looking for ways to diagnose degenerative brain conditions earlier and develop new treatments.

The study is focused on inflammasome - a cluster of proteins that can trigger long-term inflammation in the brain that has been linked to brain diseases.

Mugisho has also been named one of seven finalists in the Marie Krogh Young Women in Science Prize, winning $AU5,000 ($NZ6,170) and having a chance to win $AU50,000. The top prize will be announced on 13 October.

Connections between the eye and the brain are the focus of Mugisho’s research, and she works across the University of Auckland’s Department of Ophthalmology and Centre for Brain Research.

One strand of the study will examine tissue from the choroid, a network of blood-vessels at the back of the eye that closely resemble blood vessels in the brain.

“We can use this eye tissue to grow small blood vessels in a dish.

“These provide a good model to see how inflammation damages the connections between cells and ultimately makes then die.

“We can also use these blood vessels to test different drug treatments,” she says.

The team is developing new medicines to lower inflammasome levels in the brain. They are also testing whether medicines that are currently available for other conditions might help treat brain disorders.

With support from UniServices, a new company, Dawa Therapeutics, has been established and funded by investors as a platform to patent the drugs Mugisho is developing.

“Whatever I do has to have potential to help patients one day,” she says. 

As well as sourcing tissue from the University’s Aotearoa New Zealand National Eye Centre, the team will examine the effects of inflammation on brain tissue from the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank.

“We’re looking at age-related eye and brain diseases and whether they have shared inflammatory drivers.

“We want to understand where and when inflammation is contributing to these diseases.”

Mugisho hopes her research will help raise awareness of the role inflammation plays in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

“It’s important to reduce the general inflammatory state of the body, because that reduces the risk of brain diseases.

“Lowering stress, resting after illness, getting plenty of sleep, a healthy diet, exercising, stopping smoking, and reducing alcohol are all important for brain health.”

Mugisho’s passion for searching for answers on brain conditions was partly inspired by seeing Alzheimer’s disease take a huge toll on her grandfather, who helped raise her for the first 14 years of her life in Nigeria.

“I have experienced the pain of watching the patriarch of our family being affected by this debilitating disease that pretty much deletes people while they’re alive.

“So I feel strongly about doing something to help other families facing this pain.”

In 2004, her family moved from Nigeria to New Zealand, so her father and then her mother could complete doctorates in construction management and civil engineering.

Since completing her own PhD in Biomedical Science in 2018, Mugisho has forged a remarkable research career. She won the Margaret L Bailey Science Award and was appointed deputy director of the Buchanan Ocular Therapeutics Unit in 2020.

Mugisho works closely with Buchanan Ocular Therapeutics Unit Director Professor Ilva Rupenthal and Professor Maurice Curtis, Co-director of The Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank at the Centre for Brain Research.