Plaques all but vanish in response to some Aβ immunotherapies. Scientists suspect microglia orchestrate the mop-up, but don’t know how, exactly. Now, David Gate of Northwestern University in Chicago and colleagues offer a snapshot of the cellular response in the human brain. As reported March 6 in Nature Medicine, they used spatial transcriptomics to study postmortem tissue from 13 people who had been immunized previously with AN1792—an Aβ vaccine—and from one woman who had received lecanemab, a therapeutic antibody, as well as untreated controls in those trials.
- Spatial transcriptomics on human brains parsed microglial reactions to amyloid immunotherapy.
- Both a vaccine and a therapeutic antibody summoned these cells to plaques.
- Responders expressed TREM2, ApoE,…