Radosveta Koldamova, MD, PhD

  • Professor, Environmental and Occupational Health

Phone

413-383-7197

E-mail

radak@pitt.edu

Personal Website

Koldamova link
Koldamova & Lefterov link

Education & Training

PhD, Medical Academy & Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, BULGARIA (1994)
MD, Medical Academy, Sofia, BULGARIA (1979)

Campus Address

4135 Public Health, 130 DeSoto Street

One-Line Research Description

Translational neuroscience based on animal models of Alzheimer's disease

Our research is translational neuroscience based primarily on work with animal models of Alzheimer’s disease. For the last 10 years, our group has been working with Alzheimer’s model mice expressing human APOE3 or APOE4 isoforms. We focus on the role of genes associated with Late Onset Alzheimer’s disease such as APOE isoforms, TREM2, ABCA7, ABCA1 and others. For the last several years, our efforts were concentrated on microglia and its role in Alzheimer’s disease and traumatic brain injury. To evaluate functional and morphological changes on cellular, tissue and organism levels we apply wide array of methods such as behavior testing, immunohistochemistry, 2-photon imaging, single-cell RNA- seq, whole-tissue transcriptomic and lipidomic analysis. Significant time and effort in those projects have been spent on experiments and analysis of massive high throughput sequencing datasets transcription factor binding, histone modifications, as well as expression profiling in brain following exposure and in response to different dietary patterns and environmental toxicants, as well as the application of promising therapeutic agents. 

Representative Publications

Iliya Lefterov, Cody M. Wolfe, Nicholas F. Fitz, Kyong Nyon Nam, Florent Letronne, Julia Kofler, Xianlin Han, Jianing Wang, Jonathan Schug, Radosveta Koldamova. APOE2 orchestrated differences in transcriptomic and lipidomic profiles of postmortem AD brain. Accepted in Alzheimer's Research & Therapy, October 2019. 

 

Castranio EL, Wolfe CM, Letronne F, Nam KN, Fitz NF, Koldamova R, Lefterov I. ABCA1 haplodeficiency affects the brain transcriptome following traumatic brain injury in mice expressing human APOE isoforms. Acta neuropathologica communications. 2018 Jul 26;6(1):69. 

 

Nam KN, Wolfe C, Fitz NF, Letronne F, Carter AY, Castranio EL, Schug J, Lefterov I, Koldamova R. Integrated approach reveals diet, APOE genotype and gender affect immune response in APP mice. Biochim Biophys Acta. 2017 Oct 14;1864(1):152-161. 

 

Nam KN, Mounier A, Wolfe C, Fitz NF, Carter AY, Castranio EL, Kamboh HI, Reeves VL, Wang J, Han X, Schug J, Lefterov I, Koldamova R. Effect of high fat diet on phenotype, brain transcriptome and lipidome in Alzheimer's model mice. Sci Rep. 2017 Jun 27;7(1):4307. 

 

Castranio EL, Mounier A, Wolfe CM, Nam KN, Fitz NF, Letronne F, Schug J, Koldamova R, Lefterov I. Gene co-expression networks identify Trem2 and Tyrobp as major hubs in human APOE expressing mice following traumatic brain injury. Neurobiol Dis. 2017 Sep;105:1-14. 

 

Carter AY, Letronne F, Fitz NF, Mounier A, Wolfe CM, Nam KN, Reeves VL, Kamboh H, Lefterov I, Koldamova R. Liver X receptor agonist treatment significantly affects phenotype and transcriptome of APOE3 and APOE4 Abca1 haplo-deficient mice. PLoS One. 2017 Feb 27;12(2)