Bart De Strooper

At a glance

• Bart De Strooper is a Belgian molecular biologist and professor at KU Leuven and VIB, and at University College London. He was the founding director of the UK Dementia Research Institute.
• His research concerns secretases: enzymes that cut the amyloid precursor protein (APP), producing the amyloid peptides that build up in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease.
• In 1998 he showed in Nature that the protein presenilin is needed for this cleavage, a key discovery for understanding inherited Alzheimer’s.
• He describes Alzheimer’s as a disease with a long ‘cellular phase’, in which brain cells such as microglia react for years before symptoms appear.
• In 2018 he shared the Brain Prize, one of the most important awards in brain research, with John Hardy, Christian Haass and Michel Goedert.
• For longevity, his work lays the biological groundwork for new treatments of one of the major diseases of ageing.
• Takeaway: dementia develops over many years, so look after your blood pressure, exercise and social contacts from midlife onwards.