Jesse Cedarbaum
Yale University, CT·Medicine & Clinical Research
Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies often announce themselves years in advance. One early sign is REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), in which people act out their dreams.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
REM sleep behavior disorder
Parkinson's disease
dementia with Lewy bodies
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2030
What they work on
- Profile immune cells in the blood of all 100 RBD trial participants and in the CSF of 30 of them, using single-cell RNA sequencing and in vivo perturb-seq, to see how the anti-TNF drug adalimumab changes immune cell function.
- Characterize FoxP3 regulatory CD4 T cells, immune cells that dampen inflammation, and measure soluble markers of inflammation and neurodegeneration in blood and CSF before and after anti-TNF treatment.
- Assess brain metabolism with FDG-PET and dopamine nerve terminal integrity with dopamine transporter (DaT) SPECT in RBD patients receiving adalimumab or placebo.
- Use neuromelanin MRI to track catecholamine-producing nerve cell bodies, and wearable biosensors to measure motor and cognitive function, during two years of anti-TNF or placebo treatment.
More about the research
Both diseases are synucleinopathies, brain disorders marked by clumps of the protein alpha-synuclein. Earlier work by this team found signs of immune activation in people with RBD. These included extra T cells in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the fluid around the brain and spinal cord. They also found more inflammatory Th17 cells, a type of immune cell, in the blood. In CSF from people with RBD and Parkinson's, they found activated monocytes, immune cells that showed boosted signaling through TNF, a key inflammatory messenger. This raises a question: could blocking TNF slow the slide from RBD into full-blown disease?
Why it matters
People with REM sleep behavior disorder are at high risk of developing Parkinson's disease or dementia with Lewy bodies, and no treatment is known to delay that progression. By testing whether an approved anti-inflammatory drug changes immune cells, brain metabolism and dopamine neuron health, this work could support anti-TNF therapy or other immune-targeted approaches for preventing these diseases. It could also identify blood, CSF and imaging markers for tracking early disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Erik St. Louis
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Standardize research-grade polysomnography across NAPS2 sites and record more than 300 people with REM sleep behavior disorder twice, two years apart, alongside matched controls.
Nicholas Seyfried
Emory University, GA·Biochemistry
Build a longitudinal Lewy body dementia registry under the Parkinson's Disease Biomarker Program, collecting clinical data and biospecimens to support validation of protein biomarkers.
Mohammad Shahnawaz
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Neuroscience
Detect and amplify small amounts of alpha-synuclein strains from body fluids and brain tissue of patients with Parkinson's disease, multiple system atrophy and dementia with Lewy bodies, using the seeding-based PMCA (RT-QuIC) assay.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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