CEMO monthly seminar - Nuria Suelves Caballol

September 25, 2019

12:00-14:00

Gerty Cori room (Laennec tower) - Woluwe

CEMO is delighted to announce the seminars of the department that will be given by PhD student and Postdoc.

The seminar is followed by a lunch (kindly provided by the department) in order to allow everybody to interact and promote collaboration between labs.

Agenda:

12:00 - “Deciphering new therapeutic targets for Huntington’s disease: the role of histone deacetylase 3 and p75 neurotrophin receptor.” - Nuria Suelves Caballol (Alzheimer - Kienlen-Campard lab)

Abstract

“Huntington’s disease (HD) is a rare genetic disorder characterized by progressive neurodegeneration in specific regions within the central nervous system, which causes a triad of symptoms including motor, cognitive and psychiatric features. To date, there is no effective cure for this devastating disorder and current treatments only relieve some of the symptoms without modifying the neuropathological progression.

Transcriptional dysregulation, somatic CAG repeat instability and neurotrophic signaling alterations are key early pathogenic mechanisms and it has been recently suggested that HDAC3 and p75NTR proteins might be involved in these processes. Accordingly, the main aim of this project was to evaluate the therapeutic potential of HDAC3 and p75NTR in the HdhQ7/Q111 knock-in mouse model of HD. Our results have demonstrated that the selective inhibition of HDAC3 ameliorates cognitive deficits in HdhQ7/Q111 mice by restoring the neuronal activity-dependent transcription of important memory-related genes. Besides, we have observed that chronic HDAC3 inhibition suppresses somatic CAG repeat expansions in the Htt gene. Our results have also shown that p75NTR levels are increased in HdhQ7/Q111 mice from symptomatic stages and that p75NTR normalization delays the onset of motor coordination alterations, several neuropathological HD hallmarks and the overall neurotrophic signaling imbalance in HdhQ7/Q111 mice.

The present data suggest that HDAC3 and p75NTR might be promising therapeutic targets for treating both cognitive and motor impairments in HD.”

12:45 - Q&A session

13:00 - Lunch