Leon Smyth

Thank you very much to Maiken and her team for writing this news and views article about our recent work on bridging vein amyloidosis!

doi.org/10.1084/jem....

Amyloidosis of bridging veins in AD mouse models and humans - clogged CSF exit routes. New from Smyth, Mehta, @jonykipnis.bsky.social @washumedicine.bsky.social and colleagues: rupress.org/jem/article/...

#Neuroinflammation #Alzheimers

Amyloidosis of bridging veins in AD mouse models and humans - clogged CSF exit routes. New in @jem.org from Smyth, Mehta, @jonykipnis.bsky.social @washumedicine.bsky.social and colleagues: rupress.org/jem/article/...

#Neuroinflammation #Alzheimers

Local B cell maturation and mast cell regulation of choroid plexus function in early life. Postnatal development is a critical period for the maturation of the nervous and immune systems. The choroid plexus (CP) within the brain ventricles guides brain development through the production of ...

Excited to share our new preprint: “Local B cell maturation and mast cell regulation of choroid plexus function in early life” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... , initiated in the lab by Laetitia Travier and led by the one and only @fakesamir.bsky.social

Congrats Aleks and team 🤩

Excited to share my final postdoc project published. We looked into the striking amyloidosis of important brain waste clearance sites (bridging veins) in mouse and human. A great collaborative project with Rupal Mehta at Rush who did all the human studies. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Amyloidosis of bridging veins is a pathologic feature of Alzheimer’s disease @jem.org @jonykipnis.bsky.social @leonsmyth.bsky.social @washumedicine.bsky.social
rupress.org/jem/article-...

Beautiful work on postnatal meningeal B cell proliferation and instruction by local fibroblasts!

Early-life stromal niches orchestrate B lymphopoiesis at the brain's borders https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.27.690844v1

Microglial CLEC7A restrains amyloid beta plaque pathology in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
@alzdemjournals.bsky.social

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

I'm hiring! Come and work with me at UCL to try and understand how the brain's blood vessels go wrong and promote dementia: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Resolving the mysteries of brain clearance and immune surveillance: @cp-neuron.bsky.social www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Nice overview on the knowns and unknowns about pathways and mechanisms governing brain immunity and clearance. 🫶🏻😃

“Resolving the mysteries of brain clearance and immune surveillance”

Check it out 👇🏻
authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Resolving the mysteries of brain clearance and immune surveillance This review by Kipnis et al. explores recent advances in brain fluid dynamics, emphasizing CSF flow’s role in waste clearance, the glymphatic and meningeal lymphatic systems, and neuroimmune interacti...

A great consensus review on brain washing from the groups doing some of the most important work in the field summarizing areas of agreement and open questions.

www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Wonderful to see our work so clearly and professionally presented at #AIC2025 by co–first author and graduate student Kevin Telfer.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Thrilled to share this last little bit of my thesis work w/ @siegenthalerlab.bsky.social! 🐭🧠 Generating the PDGFRa cKO line we use in this paper was no trivial task, spanning multiple years (& a pandemic!) We were extremely excited to see this phenotype & even more excited to share it with everyone!

Congrats Julie and Hannah! Beautiful work 🤩

Our work out in @devbiol.bsky.social, PDGFra is needed for 🧠 perivascular fibroblast development... ⬇️ perivascular fibroblast = ⬇️ perivascular macrophage...cross-talk? 👀
Led by Hannah Jones @hejcell.bsky.social w/ Kelsey Abrams, Sophia Kim, excited for more projects w/ @fantauzzolab.bsky.social!

PDGFRα is required for postnatal cerebral perivascular fibroblast development Perivascular fibroblasts (PVFs) are a cell type associated with large diameter blood vessels in the brain and spinal cord parenchyma and leptomeninges…

PDGFRα is required for postnatal cerebral perivascular fibroblast development. Congrats @siegenthalerlab.bsky.social ! #cerebrovascular #fibroblasts #development

Survey: What are the fastest-growing areas in neuroscience? Respondents pointed to computational neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neuroimmunology and neuroimaging, among other subfields.

What are the fastest-growing areas in neuroscience? Survey respondents pointed to computational neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neuroimmunology and neuroimaging, among other subfields.

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroscience...

#neuroskyence #StateOfNeuroscience

Check out our recent preprint, "Live longitudinal imaging of meningeal cerebrovascular injury and its sequelae in adult zebrafish."

lnkd.in/gN7z6th4

Australia’s first Centre of Research Excellence in #Lymphoedema and Lymphatic Regeneration has launched, led by Prof @benjhogan.bsky.social and Prof Natasha Harvey, it's been dubbed a global “paradigm shift” and a major step forward.

Read more: www.petermac.org/about-us/new...

Noninvasive method lifts curtain on CSF dance in human brain Cerebrospinal fluid shows brain-region-specific dynamics, a new high-resolution MRI approach reveals.

A new method uses high-resolution MRI to provide a noninvasive, granular view of cerebrospinal-fluid movement—even in the small spaces that surround blood vessels, which have not been studied before.

By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/cerebrospina...

Attentional failures after sleep deprivation are locked to joint neurovascular, pupil and cerebrospinal fluid flow dynamics - Nature Neuroscience Yang et al. show that moments of failed attention we experience after sleep deprivation reflect brief ‘sleep-like’ episodes in the brain, corresponding to a brain- and body-wide event with altered bra...

Attentional failures during wakefulness after sleep deprivation are tightly orchestrated in a series of brain–body changes, including neuronal shifts, pupil constriction and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow pulsations

@lauradata.bsky.social @ziy027.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our B cell Keystone is getting closer! Short talk abstracts and scholarship applications are due on November 13 - get to it! www.keystonesymposia.org/conferences/...

Great work 👏 mapping how brain endothelial cells communicate with astrocyte endfeet at the blood–brain barrier in @natureportfolio.nature.com

The study identifies ligand–receptor pairs conserved in humans and altered in MS and Alzheimer’s.

Makes me also wonder how many could be druggable targets.

Lymphoid gene expression (CD28) in plaque-associated PU.1low microglia supports neuroprotective functions that mitigate the progression of Alzheimer’s disease
www.nature.com/articles/s41... @nature.com

NEW STUDY! Building on pioneering work by Dr. Alison Goate, an international team of researchers, led by #IcahnMountSinai's Anne Schaefer, ID'd distinct population of neuroprotective #Microglia that may point to new therapeutic approach for #Alzheimers. @nature.com 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Excited to see the updated results from INDIGO confirming sustained benefit of mIDH inhibition for 1st line treatment in patients with G2 gliomas. Reduced seizure frequency aligns with our findings that mIDH inhibition modulates the glioma electrical microenvironment! 👇