Research
The vital research legacy Chris Dobson left us
Colleagues of the late Chris Dobson, Professors Tuomas Knowles (left) and Michele Vendruscolo (right) in the Chemistry of Health building.
With the death of Professor Sir Chris Dobson in September, we lost a brilliant scientist committed to tackling the scourge of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. But though he has gone, his vital work lives on inside our Chemistry of Health building and Una Finlay Laboratory – a stateof-the-art facility for studying neurodegenerative disorders that Chris helped set up. It is enabling researchers to advance our understanding of the deviant proteins that cause these diseases, and develop tools for their early diagnosis. Meanwhile Wren Therapeutics, a spin-out in the building’s incubator, is developing new drug discovery methods and preparing new drug targets for clinical trials. Rachel Gardner visits the building, and meets the Cambridge alumnus with a special reason for supporting it.
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itting in King’s College Chapel in the autumn of 2015, listening to Professor Chris Dobson describe his group’s world-leading research into neurodegenerative disorders, Derek Finlay (Emmanuel, 1952) had a eureka moment.
about finding ways to treat them. “When I heard Chris Dobson outlining his hopes for what they might achieve, I thought to myself, ‘I have to meet that man’, ” Derek says. “I wanted to find out more about what he and his team were doing and the prospects for their research.”
At home in Perthshire, his adored wife Una was seriously ill with Alzheimer’s disease. The incurable disorder was taking its toll both on her and her family. Yet here in his alma mater, scientists were making breakthroughs in understanding the underlying causes of such diseases and talking optimistically
And so began a relationship between Derek – an alumnus of Emmanuel College, where he had studied Law – and the Department of Chemistry. Soon Derek was being invited into Lensfield Road to hear presentations from Chris and his colleagues Professors Michele Vendruscolo and Tuomas
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to the Chemistry of Health building. This very generous act of private philanthropy, along with industrial and charity investment and public funding from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund, played a key role in making the building possible. And the building is now fulfilling several vital functions. It gives the Centre for Misfolding Diseases the physical base that it lacked before. Unusually, it also houses a business incubator that will help translate findings from the research into clinical and commercial applications. (It is currently almost unique within the University to have an incubator embedded within a department.) Our Molecular Production and Characterisation Centre is also there, providing an array of modern biological and bio-physical facilities to the researchers.
Knowles. The three co-directors of our Centre for Misfolding Diseases talked to him about their research into protein misfolding and its role in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and motor neurone diseases. As a lawyer, rather than a scientist, some of the terms they used were unfamiliar to Derek. He nonetheless found the meeting an eye-opener. “What struck me,” he recalls, “was the very distinct nuance to the conversation. I was used to talking to doctors about the illness. But among chemists there was a completely different focus on where the answers might lie.” As Tuomas Knowles explains now, that different focus is entirely deliberate. “It has become clear that the way diseases have been classified in the past, based purely on descriptions of their symptoms, does not always map onto what’s actually happening in the body,” he says.
Mr Finlay and his family were present for the building’s official opening in September last year, and for the unveiling of the special memorial within it to his late wife Una, who sadly died in May 2016. In honour of Una, and in recognition of her interests in healthcare (she had been a long-term and much-valued volunteer for Macmillan Cancer Support), the main laboratory is named the Una Finlay Laboratory. A plaque on the wall bears a photo and information about Una, reminding everyone of the purpose of the work going on in the lab. Personal motivations for the research Such reminders of the huge societal problem created by Alzheimer’s provide real motivation to the researchers, says Tuomas Knowles. He is using his expertise in physical chemistry to develop new approaches for detecting and studying the aberrant proteins that cause Alzheimer’s disease and other misfolding disorders. Being able to find, identify and understand them would help us diagnose these diseases in patients much earlier, and that would be a vital breakthrough.
The Vendruscolo research group at work in the Chemistry of Health building.
“Diseases like Alzheimer’s can be in the body for up to 10 years before patients develop symptoms, and by then it’s too late for us to be able to treat them effectively,” he says. “That’s most likely one of the reasons why we’ve seen several high-profile drugs trials failing recently.
“Protein misfolding diseases – such as Alzheimer’s, Type 2 diabetes, or the eye condition macular degeneration – used to be considered as different diseases because they start in different parts of the brain, affect various organs in the body and progress at diverse speeds. But over the last 15 years or so, researchers have recognised what Chris Dobson had long been advocating: that at a molecular level these disorders display striking similarities.” And that brings the tantalising potential, he says, that unlocking the answer to one disorder will unlock answers to others as well.
“In all the protein-misfolding diseases, there are these really problematic species of aberrant proteins – transient oligomers – that lead to the downstream biological problems. They are very small and in many cases very short-lived and we’ve hit a roadblock in detecting and targeting them. We’ve got as far as we reasonably can with conventional methods. That’s why we’re now pushing new types of technologies that are sensitive enough to detect them.”
Making a difference Derek Finlay was so intrigued to hear about this work, and so hopeful it could benefit patients suffering from these devastating illnesses, that he donated £5 million 16
And the building’s advantage is that it brings together in one place a wide range of chemistry aimed at doing just that, from Tuomas’s physical chemistry approach (quantitative characterisation of protein behaviour), to the protein science approach (working to understand the way the disease behaves at a molecular level), to the biological chemists’ approach of understanding how the disease links with biological function. “We think that to really make progress on a problem this big, we have to take all these approaches into account,” Tuomas says.
methods for understanding and treating protein misfolding diseases,” he says. “It is also proving key in giving to our work a visibility that it did not have before, to everyone from funding bodies to private investors and to the general public. This is also greatly helping us with our recruitment of PhD students and postdocs, the researchers who are going to drive this work forward in the future.” And that is also good news as investment and collaboration are vital in translating research findings into treatments.
“My colleague Michele Vendruscolo has done some fantastic research into trying to develop specific antibodies that can detect particular types of conformations,” he adds. This work includes rationally designing antibodies so that they bind to regions of the aberrant proteins, revealing their numbers and positions for diagnostic applications, or stopping them from killing cells for therapeutic interventions. Research on this was published earlier this year in Nature Communication (and reported in the spring 2019 issue of Chem@Cam). The study showed that the smaller protein aggregates that can permeate the cell membrane can be inhibited by antibodies that bind to the C-terminal region of amyloidbeta, and that slightly larger protein aggregates that cause an inflammatory response in brain cells called microglia can be stopped by antibodies that target the N-terminal region of amyloid-beta. It argued for a wider approach to treating Alzheimer’s and suggested that instead of looking for a single ‘magic bullet’, it would likely take a cocktail of therapies to treat the disease.
Above, Derek Finlay and his daughter Fiona (centre) at the formal opening of the Chemistry of Health building. They are flanked by the Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen Toope (far left) and Chris Dobson (far right), and by Dame Fiona Reynolds, Master of Emmanuel College, and Lord Wilson of Dinton, former Master of Emmanuel College. Tuomas Knowles is making accessible to the wider biological and biomedical community the tools and approaches based on laminar flow microfluidics through a startup company, Fluidic Analytics.
New collaborations coming forward This was a collaborative study involving other researchers in the Chemistry Department and across the University, including the Department of Veterinary Medicine, the Cavendish Laboratory and UK Dementia Research Institute. And there are new potential collaborators coming forward now, says Professor Vendruscolo, as a result of having the new building, a highly visible location for the Centre for Misfolding Diseases.
Meanwhile Wren Therapeutics, the spin-out business based in the building’s incubator, is developing an innovative drug discovery method based on chemical kinetics, and indeed new drug molecules that may go into clinical trials next year. And having such work take place in the same location as the initial research was carried out is really beneficial, says Michele Vendruscolo.
“We’ve got as far as we reasonably can with conventional methods. That’s why we’re now pushing new technologies sensitive enough to detect the really problematic species.” Tuomas Knowles
“Publishing a paper with a proof of principle is the first key step, but it is then even more challenging to use that research to generate actual products. Our vision is to generate a seamless transition from the academic research. When industry partners take academic research forward, it may not be straightforward – the transmission of the know-how, and the change of personnel and lab standards, is inevitably problematic. But when there is a closer link
“The building’s greatest impact has been to provide us with a place to realise our vision for developing biophysical
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between the industry partner and the academic research, that leads to a smoother, and ultimately more successful, process.”
They all hope, he adds, that the discoveries made here will help transform the lives of those suffering, now and in the future, from neurodegenerative disorders and that the opportunities the building offers for complementary research approaches, and for researchers and industrial partners to work together more closely, “will speed up the search for ways to delay, ameliorate and ultimately abolish these dreadful neurodegenerative diseases.”
Derek Finlay is hopeful of progress. Una’s death, just a few weeks short of their 60th wedding anniversary, was a devastating blow to him and his family. Una had always travelled with him and supported him when his work in the food industry took him around the world, setting up a home for the family in whichever city they found themselves. “We had great times,” he says. “She was very tolerant of moving from one country to another and though it was hard work, she always made it fun. I was very lucky to have her.” So for him the opening of the building, and the unveiling of the lab named after her, were “a very special and poignant day for me and my family”.
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The visibility of the research taking place in the Chemistry of Health building has led to an increase in the numbers of graduate students applying to do their PhDs here. PhD students are the researchers of the future, but the decline in funding for their studies means we can’t fund all of the many talented individuals who apply here. If you would like to know more about ways to support research studentships here, or setting up joint studentships in Chemistry at your own college, please contact chemhod@hermes.cam.ac.uk
“Why I take part in this research.”
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s a researcher in both the Knowles and Dobson groups, Dr Emma Yates Sukdao has had a strong personal motivation for her work.
Her original interest in the chemistry of health, she explains, stemmed from witnessing her father’s struggles with bipolar disorder, which could not be effectively managed with medications. That led her into creating systems to measure the interactions between proteins that take place in the body, and the effects – and potential side-effects – that can happen when a protein is targeted by a drug. the market that can halt the progression of the disease – all we can really do at the moment is mask the symptoms. We have to develop basic compounds that can impact the mechanism of the disease.”
During her PhD she developed a new system to measure these interactions, with an eye on developing drugs that produce fewer side-effects. She has also worked on new tools to probe the attributes of the aberrant proteins that kill cells in patients with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.
Having a purpose-built facility, she says, really helps to support the science that goes into this work. Since she arrived in 2011, the number of researchers working on misfolding diseases has expanded considerably. “And that makes it harder to do good science. Certain instruments require a particular set-up in order to ensure the quality of the data they produce, but it’s hard to insulate an atomic force microscope appropriately if everyone is walking past it. So it’s great,” she says, “to have this new facility where there is more space and everything is so well thought out.”
As a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College (where Derek Finlay was a student), she has had the opportunity to meet him at a college event. And like him, she has seen the impact of dementia at first hand. “My grandfather had Dementia with Lewy bodies,” she explains, “and seeing my grandmother caring for him really impressed on me how much we need innovation in treatments. Alois Alzheimer first described Alzheimer’s disease as long ago as 1906, but there are still no drugs on 18