BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Could spiders lead to better treatments for neurodegenerative diseases? The Alzheimer’s Association estimates about 13,000 Vermonters have Alzheimer’s or some form of dementia. That number is only expected to increase as our population ages. A St. Michael’s college researcher thinks she has found a breakthrough while studying spider brains. But getting the scientific community on board with her findings has been an uphill battle.
For many people, being in a laboratory where there are 400 spiders is a little bit creepy. But, there’s a good reason that there are this many of them on the St. Michael’s College campus.
Ruth Fabian-Fine, an associate professor of biology and neuroscience didn’t imagine that Central American wandering spiders would capture her in a web of scientific discovery. Now she doesn’t think twice about getting up close to them. She can point out the telltale droop of the dying spiders’ bodies, and how a healthy spider sits differently.
That was the basis for a question that would ensnare her. Why were her spiders dying of neurodegenerative diseases? Thanks to the arachnids’ large brain cells, the answer wasn’t hard to find. “The neurons are so big, we quickly discovered that there’s a canal system that in healthy spiders takes in debris and in degenerating spiders, basically failed,” Fabian-Fine said.
The lightbulb moment came when she teamed up with the University of Vermont and compared spider brain cells to those from Alzheimer’s patients. “And then I looked at human neurons and I said, woah, it looks just the same way,” she recalled. “And it didn’t take us long to discover that there is a similar waste removal system. And in Alzheimer’s patients, this waste removal system had the same failures as it had in spiders.”
Her findings were published by the Journal of Comparative Neurology. However, convincing the scientific community that these spiders could unlock the mysteries of dementia has been about as easy as convincing them to pick up a spider. “I really would like to ask the neuroscience community to be open to what we are showing,” Fabian-Fine said.
“The bar is higher for a person coming from a small college,” said Christopher Francklyn, a UVM biochemistry professor and program director for the Vermont Biomedical Research Network, which funded Fabian-Fine’s research. He says to get traction, it needs to be published in a major scientific journal, presented at major scientific conferences, and catch the eye of pharma companies. “Pharma has actually had a very, very difficult time and has failed. A lot of drugs have failed.”
Francklyn’s mother died from Alzheimer’s and he knows what it’s like to watch a loved one fade away and be powerless to stop it.
Reporter Cat Viglienzoni: I think a lot of people look for hope.
Christopher Francklyn: Well, it is there because basic science actually is creating hope for people… I think this research will be actually transformative for brain health.
Fabian-Fine says they’ve already identified a drug target and are in the process of testing that it works on human brain cells. So far, she calls the results promising. “I still have sleepless nights because I know that so many people are dying, and I know that we can address this. I just need for this to be accepted,” she said.
Once her team is able to gather enough data on their drug target, they’ll need to publish that and get it peer-reviewed. She stresses her findings are not a cure for Alzheimer’s but potentially a way to slow down the progression of dementia, especially if it’s caught early.