Tremblay might be one of the most intensive gardeners that is, researchers you'll ever meet.
Marie-Ève Tremblay holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Neurobiology of Healthy Cognitive Aging.
As an undergraduate student, she used microscopy to study the reproduction of corals, but she was intrigued by more complex things.
"The brain is so mysterious," she says. "In my PhD, I grew curious about how do we change? How do we grow as individuals? I was discovering myself and my life and I wondered: at the cellular and molecular level, how do we change?"
Immune cells in the brain
That's when she learned of the existence of microglia, the brain's immune cells, and within just a few years had explored them so thoroughly that she rapidly became one of the world's preeminent experts. In fact, her curiosity and microscopy skills changed the conventional wisdom about these cells.
While once they were thought to be resting in the absence of a challenge such as infection, stress, unhealthy diet or poor sleep, Tremblay showed otherwise. In fact, her research found that microglia constantly prune damaged neurons, weed out debris from inflammation and remodel synapses, the communication points between nerve cells. They're essential for the development and operation of healthy brains.
Then she discovered dark microglia, so called because they've undergone molecular changes that render them darker and therefore easier to see under the electron microscope. They are associated with disease and, Tremblay found recently, can in fact cause it.
"Then what about stress, sleep, pathology what about treatments?" she asks.
Partnering for the future
Part of the answer includes conversations that are blossoming with two different pharmaceutical companies about therapeutic applications for microglia. As well, Tremblay is a subcontractor on a National Institutes of Health grant for research based on her findings that microglia can cause disease.
"We're getting close to having treatments," she says. "To use microglia as therapeutic vectors, to normalize stressed microglia."
Her long-term efforts are also bearing other international fruit. Adopting Sustainable Partnerships for Innovative Research Ecosystem (ASPIRE) is a Japanese-led initiative to build a network among the world's top research talent and to nurture and mobilize future research leaders. Her post-doctoral fellow Fernando González Ibáñez traveled to Japan this fall and two of her trainees were in Germany over the summer for an ASPIRE meeting.
She's also been excited to give public talks to local groups like the Alliance française, Cordova Bay 55+ and Carrefour 50+, whose interest is a perfect fit for her research of the past ten years.
"They want to hear about how to be healthy as we age," she says. "This is what I wanted: knowledge translation. To make a difference to people."
