IUN professor looks for clues to MS cure
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An Indiana University Northwest chemistry professor will begin research this week to study if there could be a link between copper deficiency and the nerve coating deterioration that leads to multiple sclerosis.
Dr. Tia Walker will begin a collaborative three-year research effort that aims to pinpoint the underlying chemistry behind how a toxin called cuprizone — that scientists use to trigger MS in lab mice — actually causes the condition.
The goal is to help answer how research scientists get from point A to point B – if you give mice the toxin, then it develops conditions that lead to MS. Does that happen because the toxin pulls “copper out of (body proteins)” – creating a possible culprit – a copper deficiency — or, is there another explanation?
Her research is being funded by a $45,000 portion of a $469,000 National Institutes of Health grant awarded to former colleague Dr. Leah Shriver, an assistant chemistry professor at the University of Akron.
As part of the research, Walker will make a simplified synthetic version of proteins that contain copper in the body. The goal is to study how the toxin interacts with those structures, Shriver said.
Shriver will eventually test the hypothesis in lab mice.
Officials at IUN hope Walker’s portion of the grant will be a milestone for the university — raising its profile for undergraduate research, giving students better professional lab experience and potentially leading to future scientific grants.
Walker’s portion of her NIH grant will let her hire up to three undergraduate researchers to assist with lab work over three consecutive summers beginning later this year.
Chemistry department chair Dr. Nelson De Leon said he hopes it will help attract more students to study there.
“We are building a program here where students can come and do — Ph.D-level research at the undergraduate level,” De Leon said.
“The whole point is to understand the mechanism for MS and look at the underlying pathways for it,” he said. “It’s always like a jigsaw puzzle you are trying to solve.”
IUN senior Jennifer Mishevich, 21, a chemistry major, will assist Walker with her lab research this summer. She plans one day to get a Ph.D. in chemistry — either working as a professor or working as a lab researcher.
Assisting Walker will give her an opportunity to learn some advanced biomedical techniques that that are also used in drug development and hypothesis testing.
“It’s kinda like a puzzle, which is really interesting to me,” she said. “It really has expanded my knowledge of what a research lab is like.”
MS is a degenerative disease where the nerve coating, called myelin, gradually breaks down and becomes damaged — like the damaged protective coating over an electric wire — leading to communication issues between the brain and body, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website.
The National Multiple Sclerosis Society estimates 2.3 million people globally have the disease.
“In most patients with MS, they have what’s called a relapsing, remitting (condition),” said Shriver. “What is happening is…the myelin is damaged and there is some capacity to repair it.”
“If you are one of those unlucky patients and have had it for a long time…there’s nothing really to treat you,” said Shriver. “You get diagnosed when you are relatively young. You don’t know if it’s going to be bad.”
“It’s really just terrible,” she said.
In long-term MS patients, that ability to repair the coating can deteriorate. The research conducted by Shriver and Walker aims to help explain the chemical factors that lead to that deterioration — that could help scientists later develop drugs to treat it.
“There’s drugs out there, but they primarily target the immune system,” Shriver said. “There’s nothing there to repair the damage.”
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