Coming into college, rising junior Olivia Estes knew she wanted to participate in research. When Alexa Wright, the assistant for Estes’s first-year interest group and an undergraduate research assistant in the Wehr lab at the University of Oregon, offered to help her get involved in the lab, Estes was thrilled. 

The two are working on a project created by Wright, looking at the effect of ketamine on Alzheimer’s disease through a mouse model.

Ketamine is a dissociative hallucinogen, used in medicine as an anesthetic. 

“Our lab does a lot of Alzheimer’s and auditory research, looking at Alzheimer's and the auditory paradigms, and understanding how those two things interact,” said Estes. 

The lab takes a multidisciplinary approach to studying auditory systems, which made it a great fit for Estes, a previous psychology major now interested in biology.

“Ketamine and other drugs in its category have been found to assist with the clearance of amyloid beta plaques, which is a protein that can cause cell death and is thought to contribute to Alzheimer’s,” said Estes. “It is also thought to contribute to dendritic and synaptic growth, so our project is the combination of those two things.”

Dendritic cells support the immune system and synapses support brain function. The project’s goal is to understand if ketamine can benefit Alzheimer’s patients.

“The initial idea behind the project was that ketamine could potentially work as a therapy to assist with lessening the impact of Alzheimer's pathology on people and helping them live more normal lives,” Estes said.

Calling for Caution

Mental health disorders are common in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, and ketamine has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression in individuals without Alzheimer’s disease. However, ketamine has not been tested on human patients with Alzheimer’s.

Additionally, the use of psychedelics can come with its own risks for certain populations, such as those with psychotic and bipolar disorders.

“These drugs are not a golden bullet,” Wright said. “There is research showing that they are remarkably effective for depression and other mental health disorders in combination with therapy.” 

Wright warns against solely using psychedelic drugs, like ketamine, to combat Alzheimer’s disease pathology. They emphasize that mainstream measures that have already shown efficacy in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease should be used before ketamine is considered.

They also did not see any significant effect of ketamine in the first iteration of the project.

“I don’t want to encourage people to go out and use ketamine if it’s not for something that would genuinely benefit them,” said Wright. 

Looking Toward the Future

Wright graduated this past spring with a degree in psychology and continued working with Estes through the summer. They are hoping to publish their findings within the next couple of months. 

This past summer, Estes participated in the Summer VPRI Undergraduate Fellowship, and will continue working on the research project during the academic year.

She hopes to continue working in research after graduating from the UO. Estes says that while she is interested in continuing with neuroscience work, she is also interested in exploring ecology and evolution.

 “I’ll continue on and see which one pulls to me more and which one I’d be more interested in doing,” said Estes. “Of course, with either, you can connect them.”  

— By Stephanie Metzger, Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation