Burnett School of Medicine Student’s Alzheimer’s Research Making Strides

FORT WORTH – There are many medical conundrums that physicians keep searching for answers for patients. One is fighting off the development of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in the human brain.  

This is what Jack Bonnell, MS2 at Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University, wants to solve. 

“I’ve seen my friends and their families struggle with Alzheimer’s and it hits hard,” Bonnell said. 

Data from 2022 showed that Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are the fifth leading cause of death globally and the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).  

Bonnell has found an opportunity in the Burnett School of Medicine at TCU’s novel Empathetic Scholar® curriculum to do research around Alzheimer’s and dementia.  

“In medicine, every patient comes in with a different presentation and a different set of problems,” Bonnell said. “Learning to do research now is a small-scale version of how we’ll be working with patients in the future.” 

Burnett School of Medicine students are required to a complete a four-year research project before graduation through the unique Scholarly Pursuit & Thesis (SPT) curriculum. The SPT course develops aspiring physicians to be life-long learners capable of critical inquiry and medical information literacy.  

Students can research anything medical or science related alongside a mentor. This gives them the space to turn passion projects into tangible research, according to Kayla Green, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Burnett School of Medicine and Professor & Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Affairs at TCU’s College of Science & Engineering. 

“Students are being less and less challenged to think independently and be creative,” Green said. “Research is one of those pure fields where we still have to engage the critical thinking components of our minds.” 

Bonnell is working with Dr. Green, and her research group called the Green Research Group. One of their biggest projects is searching for ways to deliver medications to the brain to fight Alzheimer’s and dementia in patients.  

“Once I joined Dr. Green’s research team and saw more of the research behind it, it grew as a passion of mine,” Bonnell said. 

Dr. Green’s lab at TCU is where chemistry, biology and physics intersect. They provide extensive training and collaborative opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. 

READ MORE ON HOW KAYLA GREEN IS TRANSFORMING TCU UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH

His research project in medical school is an extension of his research as a TCU undergraduate student. Through a National Institutes of Health (NIH) R15 grant, Dr. Green’s lab has been able to pay 50 undergraduate students from TCU stipends during the summer to work in the lab.  

Bonnell was one of the undergraduate students who benefitted from the grant that has been granted a continuation.  

“That grant 100% majorly impacted my project,” Bonnell said. “I probably achieved over 90% of my work over the summer.” 

His undergraduate research using iron catalysts called, “Characterization of Iron RPy2N2 AzamacrocyclicComplexes as Carbon-Carbon Coupling Catalysts” planted the seeds of what would become his SPT research in medical school.   

The problem with most medications to fight Alzheimer’s is there isn’t a direct path to get the medication into the brain. There is a well-developed barrier between your blood stream and your brain, which is called the blood brain barrier.  

“A huge target for developing drugs for things like Alzheimer’s is how to get past the blood brain barrier,” Bonnell said. 

One of the main causes of damage to the brain with Alzheimer’s is oxidative stress. There are drugs to fight it but getting them to the brain is a medical challenge. 

“It doesn’t matter how well your drug can fight oxidative stress on a bench testing in a lab,” Bonnell said. “You need to get it to the brain where the disease is occurring.” 

There are many ways to approach creating a drug delivery mechanism that could include creative drug design. In Bonnell’s research project, he’s using an approach that mimics the relationship between oil and water and how they interact.  

The drugs need to be able to cross the blood brain barrier, which acts like oil. If the drug can cross the barrier into your blood stream, which would be much like water, it needs to stay intact so it can dissolve fully and reach the brain with the Alzheimer’s fighting ingredients.  

To do that, you have to find the perfect balance in a molecule to let it go back and forth between the two, Green added. 

“They should be able to act like oil and act like water and by having both properties those molecules should be able to wiggle into a lot of places,” Green said.  

So far, Bonnell and Dr. Green have seen promising results of the iron-based molecule they’ve been using in bench-top tests in the lab. However, it’s a long road to having the drug delivery system used in a patient study.  

“There’s this saying among scientists that we can only see farther because we stand on the shoulders of giants,” Green said. “Everyone wants to come out of the womb and cure cancer but there are millions of tiny contributions that may one day lead to a cure.” 

Bonnell is hopeful that by graduation he will have successfully created the molecule compounds and be able to publish a paper on his research alongside the Green Research Group. 

“That way other people can see what we’re doing and replicate it,” Bonnell said.