Ashley I. Bush, MD, PHD
Professor of Pathology
Mental Health Research Institute of Victoria, Australia
Lecturer in Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
Dr. Bush obtained his medical degree at the University of Melbourne, and completed training as a psychiatrist and neurologist in Australia, when he became interested in the basic research issues behind the daunting epidemic of Alzheimer's disease. He subsequently decided to retrain to develop skills in basic neurobiological research. Dr. Bush did his research in the University of Melbourne laboratories of Professor Colin Masters, the co-discoverer of the original protein sequence of AB amyloid -the abnormal collection that typifies Alzheimer brain pathology. Dr. Bush completed his Ph.D. in the molecular neuropathology of Alzheimer's disease in 1992, and was awarded the prestigious Harkness Fellowship to undertake post-doctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. Rudolph Tanzi at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital.
In Dr. Tanzi's laboratories in Boston, Dr. Bush elaborated findings that had been initiated during his thesis work in Melbourne about the effects of zinc upon Alzheimer's disease biochemical pathways. He found that exposure to zinc at concentrations only slightly above physiological caused the soluble AB protein to rapidly aggregate into amyloid. This makes zinc a very likely abnormal stimulus for amyloid formation since the brain houses high concentrations of this metal, and the brain metabolism of zinc is abnormal in Alzheimer's disease.
After completing post-doctoral training, Dr. Bush became an independent principal investigator whose laboratory is now a member of Dr. Tanzi's Genetics and Aging Unit.
Dr. Bush is currently on the clinical staff in Psychiatry and Neurology at both the Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, and has academic appointments as Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and as Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Bush's laboratory currently studies the means by which the brain handles zinc in health and in Alzheimer's disease in order to determine the role that zinc metabolism plays in the Alzheimer's disease jigsaw puzzle. The project is broad-based, utilizing both basic laboratory research approaches as well as human studies.
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