At the intersection of opportunity, concern, passion and innovation lies the story of Bernardo Maximiliano “Max” Garduño, a neuroscience graduate student in the lab of Xiangmin Xu in UC Irvine’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping. A rising young investigator, Garduño is focusing his doctoral research on natural animal models for Alzheimer’s disease.
Today, Garduño’s research with degus holds great promise for future therapies and deepening our understanding of how Alzheimer’s progresses. While mice are commonly used in AD research, they do not naturally exhibit the disease’s characteristics. They rely on genetic modifications that don’t fully replicate human AD. Garduño focuses on Chilean degus because they naturally present numerous neuropathologies associated with AD, including beta-amyloid plaques, tau tangles and cognitive deficits. The extended lifespan of degus (up to nine years compared to about two for mice) allows age-related AD-like deficits to manifest more authentically.
Read the full UC Irvine article here