Lary Walker


Lary Walker is an American neuroscientist and researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is also Associate Director of the Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Emory. Walker is known for his research on the role of abnormal proteins in the causation of Alzheimer’s disease.

Education and career

Walker received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1972 from Louisiana State University, and his Master of Science and PhD degrees from Tulane University. Following a German Academic Exchange Fellowship at the University of Kassel and a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University, he moved to the Neuropathology Laboratory of Donald L. Price at Johns Hopkins University, where he began work on the biological basis of Alzheimer's disease. In 1995 he became head of the Alzheimer's disease drug discovery program at Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2003 he returned to Emory University, where he is the Marie and E.R. Snelling Professor of Neurology.

Research

Biology of Aβ (senile) plaques

Walker's early research established that a variety of neurons are involved in the formation of Aβ plaques, one of the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. With Dale Schenk at Athena Neurosciences, he discovered that antibodies to the Aβ protein can enter the brain from the cerebrospinal fluid and selectively bind to Aβ plaques and cerebral Aβ-amyloid angiopathy. Based on his work with animal models of Alzheimer's disease, Walker has proposed that humans are uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.

Prion-like properties of disease-causing proteins

Since the late 1990's, Walker's research has been directed toward the mechanisms that drive the misfolding and aggregation of the Aβ protein in the living brain. In collaboration with Mathias Jucker at the University of Tübingen, he discovered that the accumulation of Aβ can be initiated in transgenic mouse models by a prion-like mechanism in which 'seeds' of abnormal Aβ precipitate the formation of plaques and CAA. In 2000, Walker and Harry LeVine introduced the term 'proteopathy' to describe diseases characterized by the misfolding and aggregation of proteins This terminology has been adopted throughout the field of neurodegeneration, including tauopathies such as Pick's disease, synucleinopathies such as Parkinson's disease and Lewy Body Dementia, systemic amyloidoses, and others.

Awards

Walker received the Metlife Foundation Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease in 2014, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2016, and the Peter Bassoe Lectureship of the American Neuropsychiatric Association in 2017.

Selected reviews