NEWS

Morgan Thomas has joined us as a Ph.D student in the Neuroscience discipline of the Integrated BioMedical Sciences program at UT Health San Antonio. Morgan will use her past research experiences to guide us into new forays in Huntington's disease. Welcome, Morgan - we are so excited to have you on our team!

Our manuscript, Pathogenic tau accelerates aging-associated activation of transposable elements in the mouse central nervous system, has been published in Progress in Neurobiology and is now available online! We have previously reported causal links between pathogenic forms of tau, a protein that accumulates in Alzheimer’s disease and related “tauopathies,” and transposable element-induced neurotoxicity in fly and human tauopathy. In this new work, we find that age- and tau-i

The Frost Lab's first graduate student, Dr. Adrian Beckmann, has begun a position at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas as an Institute Research Investigator. Adrian leaves after 5 years with our lab. His research focused on understanding mechanisms of tau-induced cell cycle activation. Adrian was the 2018 recipient of the Joe H. Ward and Bettie B. Ward Award for Excellence in the Study of the Biology of Aging and was selected as the UTHSA commencement speaker for 2021. He receiv

UT Health San Antonio offers various outreach programs designed to give students interested in a medical or health related career an in-depth research experience. The Frost Lab welcomed four students from San Antonio, Austin, and Washington, D.C. over the summer to work side-by-side with Ph.D students on their projects. Read on to see what they have to say! Meghan Lim is a Senior at Health Careers High School here in San Antonio. "During my senior year of high school, I desig

We love our pets. They give us unconditional love, loyalty, companionship, and oftentimes do goofy things that make us laugh. Out of all the things to come out of the pandemic, a positive was that many members of our lab added a furry friend to their family. The closures and ability to work from home gave us more quality time with our pets. In honor of today, we are giving our pandemic pets and pre-pandemic pets an extra snuggle and pat on the head.

Dr. Adrian Beckmann has become the first Frost lab graduate! Congratulations, Adrian. We are so proud of you. It has been a pleasure to have you in the lab. Watch Adrian's commencement speech.

We are currently recruiting patients aged 50-80 years old with a clinical diagnosis of early Alzheimer's disease for our new clinical trial, AntiRetroviral Therapy for Alzheimer's Disease (ART-AD). The study is based on our previous findings that pathological forms of tau activate retrotransposons, or "jumping genes," and that such jumping gene activation is toxic to brain cells. The seven-month trial involves eight visits to the clinic and six months of treatment with 3TC, a

The project was inspired by multiple observations that neurons in human Alzheimer's disease acquire phenotypes that are also present in various cancers: cytoskeletal over-stabilization, nuclear pleomorphisms, decondensation of constitutive heterochromatin, transposable element activation, and aberrant activation of the cell cycle. While cell cycle activation drives tumor formation in the context of cancer, activation of the cell cycle in post-mitotic neurons is sufficient to

Please check out our new preprint! Starting with transcriptomic analyses, we find that age- and tau-induced transposable element activation occurs in the mouse brain. Among transposable elements that are activated at the RNA level in the context of brain aging and tauopathy, we find that the endogenous retrovirus (ERV) class of retrotransposons is particularly enriched. We show that protein encoded by Intracisternal A-particle, a highly active mouse ERV, is elevated in brains

Claira has joined us as a Ph.D. student in the Biology of Aging discipline. Claira, we are excited to have you! Your enthusiasm is infectious.