Wyss-Coray Lab
Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and a Research Career Scientist at the Palo Alto VA Health Care System. He received a Ph.D. in immunology from the University of Bern, Switzerland before focusing his interest on neuroimmunology and neurodegeneration at The Scripps Research Institute in San Diego and later at the Gladstone Institutes and the University of California in San Francisco. Dr. Wyss-Coray moved to Stanford in late 2002, where his laboratory is studying the relationships between aging, inflammation, and neurodegeneration with a special emphasis on Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Research Interests
The Wyss-Coray lab studies the role of immune and injury responses in neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's disease, pursuing the hypothesis that failing or dysfunctional immune responses underlie or contribute to the demise of the aging brain. He uses genetic mouse models and proteomic tools, which focus on secreted signaling proteins. Dr. Wyss-Coray has recently discovered that by looking at proteins in patient's blood, he could not only distinguish between those who had AD and those who did not, but also could identify which patients with mild memory impairments would get a clinical diagnosis of AD years later.
Figure: This "heat map" illustrates how specific proteins in blood plasma from Alzheimer's patients (AD) differ from those in cognitively normal healthy controls (NDC). Listed to the left of the map and arranged in rows are 18 proteins, which were previously identified to be sufficient to discriminate between AD and NDC. A statistical algorithm sorted the samples based on similarity in the levels of these proteins in each blood sample. Increased expression in AD versus NDC is shown in shades of red, reduced expression in shades of blue, median expression in white. Note that most AD samples are clustered to the left and the NDC samples are on the right, demonstrating that levels of the 18 proteins are sufficient to separate the two groups.
