Rosenberg to discuss Alzheimer’s vaccine at Oct. 29 President’s Lecture

By Gregg Shields

It’s been more than a century since German psychiatrist and physician Dr. Alois Alzheimer first documented the disease named after him. No cure currently exists, yet research at UT Southwestern Medical Center may be inching closer to what could potentially be the first-ever vaccine to prevent or delay this debilitating illness.

Dr. Roger Rosenberg
Dr. Roger Rosenberg

Dr. Roger Rosenberg, Director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center at UT Southwestern, will present “The End of Alzheimer’s? The Pursuit for a Vaccine,” as part of the President’s Lecture Series on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 4 p.m. in the Tom and Lula Gooch Auditorium.

For more than a decade, Dr. Rosenberg and his laboratory staff have been working on this vaccine, which targets beta-amyloid, a protein that forms plaques in the brain and is believed to be both a sign and a cause of Alzheimer’s. In animal models, this vaccine has stimulated antibodies that bind to and eliminate beta-amyloid. Dr. Rosenberg’s patented DNA vaccine to this point has eliminated problems with brain inflammation that derailed earlier clinical trials of another proposed Alzheimer’s vaccine.

“Genetic immunization with the DNA Aβ42 vaccine has the potential to be a safe therapy to delay or prevent Alzheimer’s disease, as compared with the Aβ42 peptide vaccination,” said Dr. Rosenberg, also Professor of Neurology and Neurotherapeutics and of Physiology. “DNA Aβ42 immunization has shown a 50 percent reduction in the level of amyloid-containing plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease-model mice.”

Dr. Rosenberg said he hopes to complete animal testing on the vaccine in the next few years, analyze the results, and by the end of the decade submit an application to the Food and Drug Administration to initiate human clinical trials.

“It has been 109 years since this disease was first described by Dr. Alzheimer, yet there still is no effective therapy,” Dr. Rosenberg said. “It is quite clear to me that patience, perseverance, and reassessment are going to be required to find one. Hopefully, this will be the last decade of Alzheimer’s disease in our society.”

Dr. Rosenberg served as Chairman of the Department of Neurology from 1973 to 1991, helping to develop clinical, research, residency, and fellowship programs. During that 18-year period, Dr. Rosenberg established neurology programs at Zale Lipshy University Hospital, Parkland Memorial Hospital, the Dallas Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children, and Children’s Medical Center Dallas. He relinquished his role as Neurology Chair in 1991 to focus on Alzheimer’s disease treatment and research.

In 1987, the Alzheimer’s Disease Center was established at UT Southwestern, funded by the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Rosenberg was its founding Director and continues to lead this program, which has now been funded through five consecutive competitive funding cycles and has support through 2016, representing 28 years of continuous NIH funding.

Dr. Rosenberg quite literally “wrote the book” on neurogenetics in 1995 with the publication of Rosenberg’s Molecular and Genetic Basis of Neurologic and Psychiatric Disease. It quickly became the authoritative text in the field, and was recently reproduced in its 1,500-page fifth edition.

In 1997, Dr. Rosenberg was named editor-in-chief of the Archives of Neurology, which has since been renamed JAMA Neurology. He also is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Dr. Rosenberg served as President of the American Academy of Neurology from 1991 to 1993. In 2009, the World Federation of Neurology selected him as the first recipient of its Medal for Scientific Achievement.

Dr. Rosenberg earned his medical degree with distinction from Northwestern University. He also completed a postdoctoral fellowship under Nobel Laureate Dr. Marshall Nirenberg at the NIH.

Dr. Rosenberg holds the Abe (Brunky), Morris and William Zale Distinguished Chair in Neurology.