Patricia Spilman
Neuroscientist who showed, with Veronica Galvan, that long-term rapamycin prevents memory loss in an Alzheimer's mouse model, and who later worked with Dale Bredesen on Alzheimer's drug discovery
Drug Discovery Lab, Department of Neurology, UCLA (2025) · Department of Physiology, University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (2010)
By 2010 rapamycin was known to extend lifespan in mice, but did it help with a specific disease of old age? In the Atlas study SPI2010, Patricia Spilman was first author and Veronica Galvan senior author. Mice engineered to model Alzheimer's disease were fed rapamycin for a long time. The treated mice did not develop the memory problems seen in untreated animals, and they had less amyloid-beta, the protein that forms plaques in the Alzheimer's brain. Neurons of treated mice showed more autophagy, the cell's clean-up process, which suggests one way the drug helped. The study was done in mice and does not show the same effect in people.
PubMed lists 14 papers that Spilman co-authored with Galvan or with Dale Bredesen, from 2007 to 2025. In 2025 Spilman was a co-author of a Scientific Reports paper from the Drug Discovery Lab in UCLA's Department of Neurology describing DDL-218, an orally active small molecule that raised levels of the protein SirT1 in nerve cells carrying ApoE4, the main genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer's disease, and in a mouse model.
No official profile page was found, so the current position is not confirmed.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | A | Inhibition of mTOR by rapamycin abolishes cognitive deficits and reduces amyloid-beta levels in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease SPI2010 First author: showed that long-term rapamycin prevented memory deficits and lowered amyloid-beta in an Alzheimer's mouse model, with more autophagy in neurons. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 5
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Patricia Spilman.
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- Arlan Richardson Studies how rapamycin slows ageing in mice, including the broad changes it causes in the liver, and co-authored early studies showing that rapamycin protects memory in Alzheimer's-model mice
- Jayanta Debnath Physician-scientist who studies how autophagy - the cell's self-digestion system - keeps epithelial tissue healthy and how tumours hijack it
- Natalia Podlutskaya Contributed, at the Barshop Institute in San Antonio, to mouse studies showing that rapamycin prevents Alzheimer's-like memory loss and improves cognition in normal ageing
- Randy Strong Leads the San Antonio site of the NIA Interventions Testing Program, which tests each compound in parallel at three sites under one shared protocol. He first-authored the program's reports on resveratrol and other supplements (2012) and on rapamycin combined with acarbose (2022)
- Veronica Galvan Led mouse studies showing that rapamycin prevents Alzheimer's-like memory loss and amyloid build-up, and improves learning in normally ageing mice
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