$2.8M NIH Grant Awarded to DU Professor for Work Toward Dementia Treatment

About 7 million Americans live with chronic neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Lewy body dementia—and none of them have a treatment or cure.

A University of Denver researcher aims to change that, thanks to a $2.82 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the only grant awarded by the NIH this year for small molecule therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia (AD/ADRD).

Sunil Kumar, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and his lab will use the funding to research possible therapeutics for Lewy body dementia, a form of progressive dementia similar to Parkinson’s that is caused by degeneration of tissues in the brain. 

Kumar’s strategy to find therapeutics for Lewy body dementia mirrors what he’s discovered in potential therapeutics for Parkinson’s. In 2023, Kumar received a Stanley Fahn Junior Faculty Award from the Parkinson’s Foundation that included a $300,000 grant to help fund a study to find potential drugs to treat Parkinson's disease.

Progression in diseases like Parkinson’s and Lewy body dementia occurs in part because of abnormal deposits of a protein called alpha-synuclein (aS) that spreads throughout the brain. The protein continues to build over time, and the other brain cells deteriorate, resulting in problems with cognition, motor skills, behavior and mood. 

Kumar and his team have already developed synthetic protein mimetics or foldamers, which are used to interrupt the buildup of the aS proteins and preserve motor function and cells in the central nervous system. 

If Kumar’s work through the NIH grant is successful, the next step would be a clinical trial.

Neural degenerative diseases take a toll not only on the individual who is diagnosed, but on their loved ones as well. As more Americans get older and live longer, finding treatments for these diseases have become increasingly urgent.

“In my opinion, it will be very, very hard to keep society running if we do not have treatment for neural degeneration,” Kumar says. 

This is the latest in a string of grants Kumar and his colleagues have received in the last few years.

Earlier this year, Kumar and his colleagues received a roughly $900,000 grant from the Department of Defense (DOD) to find treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). 

Kumar and his colleagues also had an article published in Nature Communications earlier this year on their work on protein mimetics and Parkinson’s.

Kumar has collaborated with his colleagues in the Knoebel Institute for Healthy Aging (KIHA) and that has played a role in his progress in the field thus far.

“We end up getting ideas, giving ideas and collaborating both in terms of knowledge and also instruments. We have a really collaborative environment (throughout the institute), which is really big,” he says.

He has also worked to involve both graduate and undergraduate students in his work as a way to expand the number of people studying neurodegenerative diseases. 

“Neurodegeneration is a big thing in our society now. I don’t need to tell them what an aging disease is like; a lot of students are already connected to it with either a grandparent, a neighbor or another older adult,” he says. 

Kumar had only two or three graduate students working with him five years ago, but that number has now reached 10 graduate students and one post-doc—with more on the way.

“(The student researchers) are really, really dedicated and we need more people because we have so many exciting things going on to push all of these disease treatments toward clinical trials,” Kumar says.