Keith Hengen, an associate professor of biology, and Luis de Lecea of Stanford University have been awarded $2.7 million from the National Institutes of Health for a five-year investigation into the power of sleep to prevent, delay, and diminish Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. 

The project builds on previous work, including a 2024 paper by Hengen and Ralf Wessel, a professor of physics, suggesting that sleep has a fundamental purpose: restoring criticality, a state of mind that promotes optimal thinking and learning. 

Hengen and de Lecea will use the NIH grant to carefully examine the relationship between sleep patterns, criticality, and brain function in mice that have been engineered to be at high risk for an Alzheimer’s-like neurodegenerative disease. 

Some mice will be put on schedules that encourage deep sleep, and some will receive pharmaceutical sleep aids. Implanted sensors will record brain activity, allowing researchers to monitor changes in criticality. Mice will also be given chances to hunt and catch insects as a test of their mental acuity. 

Hengen and de Lecea believe the project will clarify how sleep restores the brain at both the cellular and network level. “It is imperative that we identify how sleep reinforces brain function,” Hengen said. “We hope to develop targeted sleep interventions that could slow or prevent cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s and other conditions. This research could lead to new therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative diseases that affect millions.”

The ongoing research and the new grant were all made possible by a seed grant from the Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures at WashU. “We never would have gotten to where we are without the Incubator,” Hengen said.