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ventilation and, when needed, high-quality chest compressions. And it's now considered a standard procedure within ACLS treatment of certain drug overdoses. The most interesting finding related to lipid emulsion may be that the beneficial effects extend beyond the emulsion acting as a sponge to absorb the toxic drug and "likely involve the important contributions of a variety of other effects inside cells, at the cell membrane and in the plasma," Weinberg writes on the LipidRescue website (see resource box on page 28 for URL). L aDu, a biochemist at the College of Medicine, began her research journey in 1993 and has traveled down a long road from basic science to a translational research breakthrough. This work addresses the critical issue of why apoE4, one of the three variants of the apoE gene, presents the greatest genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, at 15 times the norm. Building on her pioneering biochemical and cell culture experiments, she developed a transgenic mouse, first introduced in a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in November 2012, that mimics the progression of the human disease more closely than any of the dozen existing transgenic Alzheimer's mouse models. LaDu, an associate professor of anatomy and cell biology, and her lab team developed an antibody and series of tests that allow identification of the earliest accumulations of one specific form of amyloid beta, oligomeric Abeta, believed to be one of the keys to the specific brain damage characteristic of Alzheimer's. They recently reported the second part of their six-year study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Further, LaDu developed a test to measure the amount of apoE bound to amyloid beta, which showed transgenic mice with apoE4 exhibit an increase in the oligomeric form of amyloid beta and lower levels of apoE bound to Abeta, compared with mice carrying the other, more benign variants of apoE. LaDu and her colleagues validated this data in human brain tissue and cerebral spinal fluid from Alzheimer's patients as compared with controls. Levels of oligomeric Abeta increased and apoE bound to Abeta decreased in Alzheimer's cases and further with apoE4. In doing so, LaDu has established biomarkers and an animal model that track progression of the disease and could revolutionize the development of candidate drugs to prevent or treat Alzheimer's in its earliest phases. Labs around the world are currently using her mice to test promising therapeutics. "We think the measures we've developed to characterize this mouse are going to carry over in humans and could possibly become "Translational science builds on observations Photo: Lloyd DeGrane 26 | Spr i n g 2 013 in patients that give you insights into what you should be working out at the basic level," says Victor Gordeuk, MD, shown administering chronic pain treatment to a patient. He has led a team of researchers at the college's Sickle Cell Center in investigating remedies for the disease's often chronic pain and sometimes fatal symptoms.