Dr. Frautschy has spent more than 30 years researching treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. Beginning at Scripps Research Institute and UCSD, she studied how fibroblast growth factor affects the clearance, accumulation, and toxicity of amyloid plaques in the brains and CNS vasculature in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Moving to UCLA in 1994, she developed amyloid infusion models that displayed neuronal and cognitive deficits and chronic neuroinflammation, and used these models to screen interventions that advanced four therapies into the first transgenic AD model and on to clinical trials. She has coauthored 112 peer reviewed manuscripts and one book.

Dr. Frautschy is currently testing novel interventions directed at eliminating tau and synuclein aggregates in transgenic models and relieving Alzheimer pathology in a new pre-clinical model. Although she is relatively new to the Parkinson’s field, PD and AD show similar pathological accumulation of misfolded proteins, providing a clear target for emerging aggregate-clearing therapeutics.