11:01am
Gary W. Arendash, PhD
Professor of Biology and Psychology
University of South Florida, and
The Byrd Alzheimer’s Institute
Tampa
Dr. Gary W. Arendash is Professor of Biology and Psychology at the University of South Florida and a researcher at the Byrd Alzheimer's Institute in Tampa. He received his Ph.D. degree in Physiology/Neuroscience from the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center and performed postdoctoral research at the UCLA Brain Research Institute prior to relocating to Florida. Dr. Arendash has over 80 publications in the area of brain aging, memory loss, and Alzheimer's Disease. He has given seminars extensively throughout the country to health professionals as a faculty member of the Institute of Cortext, which provided continuing medical education credit to seminar attendees. Dr. Arendash's main research interest is in developing protective measures and effective treatments against Alzheimer's Disease through the use of Alzheimer's transgenic mice. These mice develop Alzheimer's brain pathology and become cognitively impaired as they age. In highly controlled studies not possible with human subjects, he has evaluated various protection and treatment strategies in these mice to determine how effective they might be in humans.
Several years ago, Dr. Arendash and his colleagues performed the initial studies demonstrating that a vaccine can protect Alzheimer's mice against cognitive impairment. Continuing his vaccine research against Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Arendash and his colleagues have just developed a new vaccine that reverses memory impairment in Alzheimer's mice for many months, suggesting that this vaccine could benefit Alzheimer's patients long-term.
Dr. Arendash has been very interested in environmental factors, such as cognitive activity and diet, that may protect against Alzheimer's Disease. He and Dr. Huntington Potter (CEO of the Byrd Alzheimer's Institute) performed the first studies demonstrating that environmental enrichment (cognitive, physical, and social activities) can not only protect Alzheimer's mice against cognitive impairment, but also improve cognitive function after the mice become memory-impaired. Through a 5-year Alzheimer's Disease Research Center grant that has just been awarded to USF and the Byrd Institute, Dr. Arendash is currently dissecting out the components of environmental enrichment that are most important to protect against or treat Alzheimer's Disease.
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