With support from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, An-Phu Tran Nguyen has begun his appointment at UWMilwaukee as both an assistant professor of biological sciences and as a Shaw Scientist.
Shaw Scientist awards were developed by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, working with a panel of leading researchers and scientists, to fulfill the wish of Dorothy Shaw.
Shaw, a philanthropist who lost two sisters to cancer, left the bulk of her estate, a $4.2 million gift, to the Foundation with this challenge: Find a way to support emerging scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee engaged in research in the fields of biochemistry, biological science or cancer research. Each year, scientists from UWM or UWMadison who are in the early stages of their career can be nominated for this award, which provides $200,000 in unrestricted funding.
Tran Nguyen now joins the ranks of those awardees. Tran Nguyen said he is honored to be chosen as a Shaw Scientist and excited to make his own mark at UWM. His nascent research program will be supported by the Greater Milwaukee Foundation’s Shaw Fund.
“When I started to look up the information about the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, I saw a lot of fantastic scientists who have been awarded over the years with the Shaw Scientist Awards, and I am in admiration of their work. I feel really honored to be funded by the same institution,” Tran Nguyen said. “I cannot say thanks enough for their support.”
Here’s a closer look at one of the newest Shaw Scientists.
A world traveler
Tran Nguyen is a native of Vietnam, and he’s keenly aware of the aftereffects of the Vietnam war.
“I’m a lucky generation. We grew up without a war to worry about,” he reflected. “There was a long isolation of the country for nearly two decades.”
But in the last three decades, the country has been “opening up and quickly growing,” allowing Tran Nguyen and his peers to understand just what they were missing.
“There was a lot to catch up on. We had the idea that we were so behind in technology and education,” he said. “Everyone wanted to try to get out and see the world.”
And see the world he did. Tran Nguyen threw himself into his education, starting with learning French. That made it easy for him to study at Le Mans Université in France before transferring to the Université d’Angers, where he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and specialized in cellular and molecular signaling in health and diseases. He continued his studies with a PhD that he earned at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, funded by the Marie Curie Actions program, and then a post-doc position at the Van Andel Institute in Michigan, where he was also promoted to a reasearch scientist position.
Now, he’s settling into his new role as an assistant professor at UW-Milwaukee.
Parkinson’s and genetics
Tran Nguyen’s research focuses on Parkinson’s Disease (PD) – specifically, its genetic components.
PD is a neurogenerative disorder. Public figures like Michael J. Fox, Muhammed Ali, Pope John Paul II, and others were diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Around 90,000 Americans are diagnosed with PD each year, according to the Parkinson’s Foundation. Its symptoms include unintended or uncontrollable movements, muscle stiffness, and difficulty with balance and coordination.
“The main cause of those is a lack of dopamine that is released by dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, a structure located in the basal ganglia. It’s a small part of the brain, but it’s important. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a kind 1of a master regulator of mood and movement,” Tran Nguyen explained. “In PD patients, the dopaminergic neurons are dying, causing a dopamine deficiency.”
But while scientists understand that a lack of dopamine is the culprit of the symptoms, “we still don’t know what is causing the loss of nigral dopaminergic neurons and not others in PD,” he said.
As more and more scientists have begun studying PD and other neurodegenerative diseases, they have found some genetic links that may point to causes of PD, and potential therapeutic targets. Tran Nguyen has been studying a gene known as LRRK2.
“The gene is encoding for a protein with the same name: Leucine-rich repeat kinase 2. Kinase is an enzymatic function. There are a lot of reasons why we’re interested in studying LRRK2. The mutations in this gene (show up) most frequently in the familial PD cases,” he said.
The familial mutations of LRRK2 tend to increase its kinase activity, which could lead to dopaminergic cell loss in animals as shown in Tran Nguyen’s paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
“The idea is if the mutation causes very abnormal, elevated kinase activity, we could think of a therapeutic approach trying to normalize this. It may help to slow down the progression of the disease. That’s the starting point,” Tran Nguyen said. “There are a lot of pharmaceutical companies right now that are working on developing LRRK2 kinase inhibitors. Some of them are being tested in clinical trials.”
There is still much to study in the field, and Tran Nguyen hopes he can continue that work at UWM.
Settling into UWM
Tran Nguyen has high hopes for the new school year. He wants to get to know Milwaukee. He wants to fill the rows and rows of empty shelves in his new office. And he wants to train the next generation of neuroscientists by establishing a lab at the university.
“I have a lot of projects that have started to mature, which I hope can develop further. Having an opportunity like this to have some independent funding to move forward with some of these projects is very exciting,” Tran Nguyen said.
With support from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and a new community of student researchers, the next breakthroughs in Parkinson’s research may just come from Tran Nguyen’s lab at UW-Milwaukee.