Maeda, Sumihiro

In 2001, I joined the laboratory for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) at RIKEN Institute and started my PhD works on tau protein. During my doctoral thesis, I found an oligomeric species of tau aggregate in in vitro and purified tau oligomers from AD brain, which was the first purification of oligomeric species from human brains. After I finished my doctoral thesis in 2006, I obtained a post-doc position in the same laboratory to translate my findings into therapies. To find therapeutic targets, we searched two kinds of molecules: (1) aggregation inhibitors to disrupt the aggregation of tau and (2) probes for tau oligomer to use for diagnosis before the onset of AD. In 2008 I joined the laboratory of Dr. Lennart Mucke at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease. I studied the pathogenesis of A152T human tau variant (hTau-A152T) that is genetically linked to AD for the first time and found that hTau-A152T could induce epileptic activity independent of tau aggregation. In 2016, I was appointed instructor at Keio university school of medicine and launched some projects to study the pathogenesis of tau protein using iPSC-derived neurons.

• Alzheimer's disease
• /Tau protein
• /iPS cells
• /Mouse models
• /Epilepsy
• /Epilepsy