Getting Personal About Alzheimer’s Research
Before you get to the room with the eyeballs, there’s nothing too intimidating about the laboratory in which Keith Del Villar works.
On the third floor of McKibben Annex at the USC Medical School, it seems, at least to the layperson, a pretty standard scientist’s lair. Shelves of beakers and bottles and test tubes, droppers and slides and laboratory film, rubber gloves and stacks of paper threatening to spill over. A computer, a microscope--these are recognizable, though several machines are not, including a sealed glass case lit by ultraviolet light.
Del Villar, however, is decidedly not standard scientist issue--young, dark and handsome, with a ready smile and a hoop earring in one ear, he looks more like an actor playing a scientist whose best friend is, perhaps, Johnny Depp. So for a few moments, it’s difficult to keep in mind that this is a neurology and pathology department lab and that Del Villar, at 32, is a molecular biologist specializing in Alzheimer’s disease.
Until he takes you into the room with the eyeballs. Single eyeballs, suspended in jars. Rows of jars. Rows of jars of eyeballs. Staring at you.
“I still haven’t gotten used to it,” Del Villar says with a shrugged-off laugh. “But it’s great because our researcher is a pathologist, so we get those--and primary brain tissue.”
He motions to the rows above the eyeballs, the jars filled with darker liquid in which hang slices and chunks of darker tissue. How fitting that it would be kept above the eyes.
Del Villar shows off the room, and the rest of the lab, with its computer-attached super-duper microscope and its sub-zero storage room--with the head-ducking pride of a teenage boy showing off the new stereo system his parents bought him. Which is, in a way, appropriate. Because access to labs does not come cheaply, and Del Villar is working here at USC courtesy of the John Douglas French Alzheimer’s Foundation Adopt-a-Scientist program. Earlier this year, Pacific Palisades residents Bill and Laura Siart chose Del Villar from a half-dozen Alzheimer’s researchers and agreed to fund his work at a cost of $30,000 a year for two years, the standard Adopt-a-Scientist grant.
“We were just so impressed with his work,” says Laura Siart, who is a member of the French Board of Directors. “And the fact that he is from Los Angeles--well, we thought that was very important, to show a commitment to the community.”
And to ending the disease.
Siart’s mother suffers from Alzheimer’s, and its devastating effects, she says, have been very difficult to watch. Hence her decision to join the foundation in November.
“My husband and I have been active in other areas,” she says, “but I really think people don’t get involved in health issues until someone close to them is suffering. And for us, this program was a perfect way to support the research.”
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The 15-year-old French Foundation funds Alzheimer’s research through a variety of grants and fellowships--last year alone it doled out $1.6 million. Three years ago, it debuted the Adopt-a-Scientist program in an effort to provide funding for young researchers who showed great promise but whose work was not yet established enough to impress those handing out grants at government or university levels.
“By the time the two years are up,” says Sharon Linkletter, the foundation’s vice president, “most of them will have built enough research to go for the government money.”
Young scientists from around the world apply for the grants, usually just after receiving their doctorates. These applications are reviewed by the foundation’s International Scientific Advisory Board, which selects six to eight candidates, and then it’s up to Linkletter to get funding for them. She puts together a dossier on each and sends them to individuals, like the Siarts, who have indicated an interest in adopting a scientist.
Although Linkletter would be happy to send the information anywhere in the world, so far donors have come exclusively from Southern California. Not all donors can afford the entire “adoption” amount, so Linkletter often combines donors for a single researcher to make up the difference.
“So far we’ve gotten everyone funded, and the personal aspect of the program is really the reason for its success,” she says. “People like to know where exactly their money is going.”
Del Villar appreciates the personal aspect as well--much of a research scientist’s career is spent in the never-ending quest for funding--but neither he nor any of his colleagues had ever heard of such a program.
“I like that it shows people are interested. It’s very humanizing,” he says. “And accountability is always a good thing.”
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Accountability is essentially what Del Villar is studying--that is, what signals account for a cell’s degeneration with the onset of Alzheimer’s. Del Villar, who shares the lab with other researchers working on neuro-degenerative diseases, looks at what sort of molecular processes are activated when something begins to go wrong within the cell.
“We know some symptoms of Alzheimer’s so we concentrate on those,” he says. “We know, for instance, that senile plaques attach themselves to neurons and the stress somehow leads to the cell’s death. I’m trying to find out what sort of messages are being relayed into the cells, to see if there is a way we can stop that death message.”
Del Villar, who grew up in Corona, landed at USC after doing his doctoral work at UCLA. “It seems like a big change, to go from cancer to Alzheimer’s,” he says, “but with both you are dealing with signals--how the death of a cell is activated.”
His supervisor, Dr. Carol Miller, had worked with the French Foundation, and soon Del Villar was writing a thank-you letter to his “adoptive parents,” inviting them to visit him at the lab.
Laura Siart says they plan to drop by someday soon.
But then, she probably doesn’t know about the eyeballs.
Mary McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.
