Douglas Ethell PhD

Doug Ethell is a neurobiologist living in southern California. He received a PhD in Developmental Neurobiology from the University of British Columbia in 1993. He did post-doc research at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry as a Human Frontiers of Science Long-term Fellow from 1993-6. Returning to the west coast in 1996, he worked with Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman at the Scripps Research Institute. An interest in neuron cell death mechanisms led to him to focus his research on neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). At La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology he showed that neurons express CD95L, a major suppressor of activated CD4+ T cells, when they are exposed to oligomers of the AD peptide, A?. From 2002-10 he was on faculty at the University of California Riverside where he established that A?-specific CD4+ T cells are protective against AD as they reduce cognitive deficits and brain pathology in mouse models. In 2010, Doug moved his lab to the Western University of Health Sciences and established the Molecular Neurobiology Group. Translating his earlier work from mouse to man he invented and patented a new method to identify rare antigen-specific CD4+ T cells, called CD4see. Using CD4see, the Dr. Ethell’s lab described an age-dependent decline of A?-specific CD4+ T cells that occurs 10 years earlier in women than men. Furthermore, this decline is accelerated by the AD risk factor ApoE4, with the most rapid declines occurring in peri-menopausal women who carry that allele. In 2014 Doug Ethell put forth a revolutionary hypothesis suggesting that AD is caused by age-dependent changes in the cribriform plate that reduce cerebrospinal fluid clearance of brain regions affected early in the disease. Dr. Ethell is the Founder of Oceanside Biotechnology, which is developing a novel therapy for Alzheimer’s disease.