Endothelial Leakiness Induced by Amyloid Protein Aggregation

Abstract Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a major cause of dementia debilitating the global ageing population. Current understanding of the AD pathophysiology implicates the aggregation of amyloid beta (Aβ) as causative to neurodegeneration, with tauopathies and neuroinflammation considered as other major culprits. Curiously, vascular endothelial barrier dysfunction is strongly associated with Aβ deposition and 80-90% AD subjects also experience cerebral amyloid angiopathy. Here we show amyloid proteins-induced endothelial leakiness (APEL) in human microvascular endothelial monolayers as well as in mouse cerebral vasculature. Using signaling pathway assays and discrete molecular dynamics, we revealed that the angiopathy first arose from a disruption to vascular endothelial (VE)-cadherin junctions exposed to the nanoparticulates of Aβ oligomers and seeds, preceding the earlier implicated proinflammatory and pro-oxidative stressors to endothelial leakiness. These findings are analogous to nanomaterials-induced endothelial leakiness (NanoEL), a major phenomenon in nanomedicine depicting the paracellular transport of anionic inorganic nanoparticles in the vasculature. As APEL also occurred with the anionic seeds of pathogenic alpha synuclein and functional FapC bacterial amyloid, this study projects a general new paradigm for elucidating the vascular permeation, systemic spread, and cross-seeding of amyloid proteins that underlie the pathogeneses of AD, Parkinson’s, as well as a range of amyloid diseases.