Dra. Alejandra Álvarez
Bioquímico y Doctor en Biología Celular y Molecular de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
I am a biochemist and a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC). My line of research focuses on the study of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases. Since my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry, I have been interested in understanding the mechanisms involved in different pathologies, and the research focused on the search and design of therapeutic alternatives. In my undergraduate thesis, I participated in studies focused on vaccine development for Typhoid Fever. Subsequently, as a biochemist, I worked for three years as an associate researcher studying the cellular alterations caused by peroxisomal proteins genes mutations in Zellweger Syndrome and as an associate researcher in the development of monoclonal antibodies against Salmonella Thypi for a PNUD project. In 1992 I started the Cellular and Molecular Biology PhD program and since 1994 I have been working on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) research. In my Doctoral Thesis characterized the acetylcholinesterase effect promoting the Aβ peptide aggregation. During my Ph.D. thesis, I published 11 articles in journals that include Neuron, J. Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, and J. Molecular Biology among others.
In 1997 I obtained a Postdoctoral fellowship to study the genesis of paired helical filaments (PHF) in AD. In my postdoc, I deepened my background in signal transduction pathways involved in neuronal death and cytoskeletal alterations associated with neurodegeneration (1998-2000). I also trained in the management and analysis of neuronal cultures and animal models of brain diseases.
In 2000 I returned from my post-doctorate and joined a Fondap project for Biomedicine at UC, where I studied the role of the Wnt signaling pathway in AD. I participated in 6 publications. In addition, I performed two research stays at the Center for Neurological Diseases of the Harvard University School of Medicine and one at the Institute for Research in Neurosciences at the University of California at Santa Barbara, in the United States.
Since 2002, I have been a professor at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology of UC, and since 2017 I have been a full professor. In my research line, we studied the physiological as well as pathological mechanisms that regulate the function of synapses, neurons, and other cells of the nervous system. In the last years I have been actively conducting research focused on understanding the role of c-Abl tyrosine kinase signaling in neurons, mainly synaptic plasticity, dendrite growth, and connectivity as well as c-Abl role in the genesis and progression of various neurodegenerative diseases such as AD, Niemann Pick type C disease (NPC), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and more recently in Epilepsy. In the last years, with my joining the MIII, we are studying the role of this kinase in the susceptibility to developing epilepsy associated with viral infections and neuroinflammation. We reported the key role of this new c-Abl signaling pathway in apoptosis and tau protein phosphorylation in neurons and animal models of AD. We identified pro-apoptotic p73 and cdk5 proteins downstream c-Abl signaling (published in Brain, Faseb J, Neurobiol Dis) and described new molecular targets for the c-Abl kinase such as HDAC2 and TFEB proteins (Published in Molecular Cell and iScience). More recently we have been studying c-Abl as a key regulator in synaptic plasticity, memory, and learning.
My research has received funding from both Chilean national agencies (ANID) and international foundations (Ara Parseghian and Penn Orphan Disease Center). In recent years we have established a fruitful collaboration with the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health of USA (NCATS-NIH) we have developed new c-Abl inhibitors for the treatment of AD that have been protected in the United States. I successfully managed projects, collaborated with other researchers, and published numerous papers. At present my publication record is 82 ISI-published articles, 72 of which are original articles, my H factor = 39 with 6635 total citations. I want to emphasize that my academic productivity is mainly (87%) of original articles, I consider myself productive in research and new knowledge generation.
But the achievement that most satisfy me is that it trained numerous students: 15 undergraduate Biochemists and Biologists, 3 Master, 16 Ph.D. students, and 6 Postdoctorates. I was chair of the PhD program in Cellular and Molecular Biology, and I am part of the three PhD programs academic staff and one Master’s program.