Annemieke Rozemuller: back to the anatomy of brain dysfunction
‘What I find most fascinating in my work is to follow and study the development of a disease. From a mutation or an erroneous protein, up to the actual pathological symptoms of the disorder. For many diseases we still don’t know the cause; those ones I like the most.’
Delivering clues for deeper research is the added value of her group for the Neuroscience Campus, according to Rozemuller. ‘Together with the genetics groups we can find new genes. In the department of pathology, we can find new proteins and make several proteins visible in the brain at the time time to study their interaction. Moreover, we can study their relevance in different stages. The most relevant proteins can be used in cell culture models and in transgenic mice. Other groups can use these models to investigate these proteins more in detail.’
Annemieke Rozemuller is a neuropathologist at the pathology department of the VUmc. The most interesting part of her work, she says, is dedicated to the Brain Bank. This Bank was initiated in 1985 as a large biobank with brain tissues. Currently, the Bank contains the brains of three thousand donors with and without neurological disorders.
Rozemuller started her career at the VU, with a PhD project on the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease: what happens in the cells when the disease commences and progresses? She became a pathologist and neuropathologist at VUmc. In 1999, she decided to move to the AMC, where she stayed for seven years to work on muscle pathology. ‘I wanted to broaden my horizon, and the VUmc already had two neuropathologists.’Although during these seven years Rozemuller worked on neuropathology and muscle pathology, she never really turned her eyes from her passion: the study of neurodegeneration.
Now she is back at the VUmc, working on the brain again. ‘I am proud to be back. Three years ago, neurology professor Marjo van der Knaap and Chris Meijer asked me to return to the VUmc. I took my time, but now I can say I have made the right decision.’
Amyloid
She pioneered Alzheimer’s research long before the scientific community discovered it. ‘At that time, dementia was a mystery, and working on Alzheimer’s was considered to be dull and pitiful.’ Rozemuller ignored the trend, and proved to be right: she was the first to show immunohistochemical images of consecutive stages of Alzheimer. ‘We focused on the protein amyloid, which we assumed to be crucial. I observed a whole range of older people without any symptoms but with beginning plaques in their brain, and some totally demented people heavily loaded with amyloid and secondary changes in the cytoskeleton.’
Other groups used these clues to investigate the role of amyloid in more detail. For Rozemuller, this type of cooperation is one that will happen a lot within the Neuroscience Campus. Rozemuller: ‘The Brain Bank takes an important position here. It can be used for retrospective analyses: how often are clinical diagnoses wrong, and why? Should we have been able to observe certain disorders in an earlier stage?’
