Blog – British Neuropathological Society Meeting Highlights

The 125^th meeting of the British Neuropathological Society (BNS) was recently held at the Royal College of Surgeons in London, bringing together clinicians and researchers to share their research and findings in neuropathology. In this blog, I will be sharing some of my highlights from this year’s meeting, and what I hope to see more of next year.

In previous blogs I’ve shared my route into neuropathology research, and during my career I’ve been very fortunate to work in three large neuropathology labs in the UK, specifically Sheffield, Newcastle, and Glasgow. This means that I’ve had the pleasure of attending and presenting my research at the BNS meeting in previous years. This year, however, was slightly different. My colleagues in Glasgow and I presented our new data on the time course of the neuroinflammatory response following traumatic brain injury (TBI), but I was also kindly invited by Professor Tammaryn Lashley, from the UCL Institute of Neurology and President of the BNS (announed at the event), to share my highlights of the meeting with the Dementia Researcher network.

The meeting historically begins with a Symposium which takes place the day before the full meeting and this year was focused on alternative perspectives in neurodegeneration. Unfortunately, I had to miss this because of a teaching commitment (a first year pathology class, no less), but I was able to catch up with Professor Lashley who described the Symposium as a “comprehensive exploration of neurodegenerative disorders” with notable highlights including: Professor Jon Schott from UCL who provided insights on cognition and dementia risk; Professor Mina Ryten from the University of Cambridge, presenting an exploration of transcriptomics in human neurodegeneration; Professor Marco Prinz from the Institute of Neuropathology in Germany, who discussed the myeloid side of the human brain; and Professor Dorothee Dormann from the Institute of Molecular Biology in Germany, on the elucidation of molecular mechanisms in neurodegenerative disorders. The Symposium culminated in the Dorothy Russell Memorial lecture by Professor Anthony Schapira from UCL, which focused on the Parkinson’s disease gut-brain axis, shedding light on groundbreaking research and promising avenues of future exploration in the neurodegeneration field. Professor Lashley described a particular highlight being the discussions between attendees generated by the topics covered, with the hope that they will lead to future research collaborations.

Following on from the theme of the Symposium, the first day of the full meeting began with a scientific session on neurodegeneration, with 15-minute presentations followed by flash talks. The first notable presentation which I found particularly interesting was by Christopher Brown from the University of Southampton, on testing the efficacy of a tau-targeting vaccine in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). With significant advances in anti-amyloid-β antibody-based treatments hitting the headlines in recent years, it is important to note that many dementia researchers agree on the need for multiple targets before we can truly have an effective treatment strategy for AD.

The second talk from this session on neurodegeneration which stood out for me was by Phoebe van Meter from the University of Sheffield, who presented her research on the prevalence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) pathology in sporadic motor neuron disease. As CTE is a neurodegenerative disease linked to head injury exposure, a research area I’m interested in, I was keen to hear about the prevalence of these co-pathologies and the limitations associated with a lack of clinical history information that can be tied in with the neuropathological assessments.

The second session focussed on brain tumours. A talk by Catherine Taylor from the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health was particularly notable. She discussed the diagnostic utility of Whole Genome Sequencing in a paediatric brain tumour cohort, identifying somatic variants and information on tumour mutation burden, mutation signatures, and germline variants.

The third session of Day 1 featured miscellaneous topics including cerebrovascular disease pathology in the Corsellis Brain Collection, a unique biobank cohort, presented by Abdur Raafay Iqbal from Newcastle University. Also from Newcastle was Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Fellow, Daniel Erskine, who discussed the novel pathophysiological mechanisms in metachromatic leukodystrophy, a rare paediatric lysosomal storage disorder, and potential treatment targets. Studying the disease mechanisms of rare disorders can provide insight into more common conditions which are predominantly sporadic.

Day 2 involved a second session on neurodegeneration, before the clinical update, case reports, and diagnostic slide session. My highlight from the neurodegeneration session was a talk by Alan King Lun Liu from the University of Oxford, on revisiting the pathological staging and grading of Parkinson’s disease. His talk emphasised how the diversity of particular disease pathologies can require a panel of antibodies targeting different epitopes. This needs systematic antibody optimisation and can have implications for diagnostic consensus criteria.

Finally, I want to share my poster highlights, some of which were also presented as flash talks. Firstly, Delphine Boche, from the University of Southampton, shared research from her lab which suggested translocator protein could be related to a microglial phagocytic phenotype in AD. Secondly, Bridget Benson, from the University of Sheffield shared her interesting work on characterising neuronal and glial senescence markers in relation to dementia. Thirdly, some shameless self-promotion, some of my own research was presented in a poster by Shannon Gilchrist from my previous lab in the University of Glasgow led by Professor Willie Stewart. We shared our work on the time course of the neuroinflammatory response following TBI through quantitative assessment of microglial morphology.

My final highlight of the BNS meeting was a conversation I had with Lauren Walker, Alzheimer’s Research UK Fellow at Newcastle University. I’ve closely followed Lauren’s research for a while, as we were postdocs in adjacent labs at Newcastle. I was therefore keen to get an update on her work. Lauren is interested in mixed pathologies and here she was presenting her research focussing on dementia with Lewy bodies. Many of us within the dementia field work on specific neurodegenerative diseases in isolation of co-morbidities. However, what we know from the neuropathological assessment of post-mortem brains of people who had dementia, it’s rare for single disease pathologies to exist; often there are mixed pathologies, with neuropathologists needing to assess which is the primary pathology and which are co-morbid. The occurrence of multiple pathologies has significant implications for treating dementia in life, and as I previously said, we are therefore likely to need multiple targets for effective treatment. I felt like Lauren’s work was some of the most important research presented at the meeting and left me thinking about how these different disease pathologies develop, progress, and co-exist.

The BNS meeting is relatively small and friendly, balancing research and clinical neuropathology perspectives. Abstracts from the talks and posters are now published in Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology if you want to find out more about what research was presented. In future meetings I hope to see more discussion on mixed pathologies and what this means for treatments. But one thing is guaranteed; many of the same people attend every year, which makes for a good catch up with old friends.

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali

Author

Dr Kamar Ameen-Ali is a Lecturer in Biomedical Science at Teesside University & Affiliate Researcher at Glasgow University. In addition to teaching, Kamar is exploring how neuroinflammation following traumatic brain injury contributes to the progression of neurodegenerative diseases that lead to dementia. Having first pursued a career as an NHS Psychologist, Kamar went back to University in Durham to look at rodent behavioural tasks to completed her PhD, and then worked as a regional Programme Manager for NC3Rs.

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