“I always had a lot of dreams about getting a really good education and going to college,” James said. “But I didn’t know how I would be able to do that. But when I moved to Miami, it became more of a reality.”

And while James had a passion for art as well, her mother had other plans.

“I got a lot of encouragement to become a scientist,” James said with a smile. “My mom encouraged me a lot because also in high school, I had some natural skill in art and I wanted to study art. She said, ‘I think you should do science. You will always have a job.’ I wasn’t sure which way I should go. But the passion for the sciences was always there. I don’t regret it at all. The art is a hobby now.”

With her mom’s encouragement, James’ academic career took off.

“I first went to Miami-Dade College where I studied pharmacy and got an associate’s degree in pharmacy,” James said. “And then I went to Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida and got a degree in biology. I was on the med school track. I decided to pursue a Ph.D. instead because I have a problem-solving kind of mind and wanted to study drug development and how diseases affect the body. And so I went for a degree in pharmacology. I got my Ph.D. at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Missouri in 2011. Pharmacology is a study of drugs. You can look at it as two different approaches. What do drugs do to your body? And what does your body do to the drug.”

UW-Madison beckoned James after that and she did some post-doctorate work in toxicology.

“I studied toxicology, which is similar to pharmacology, but it is interested in how much of something is bad for you,” James said. “At UW-Madison and the toxicology program, I was developing techniques that could be used to detect compounds from the environment that we can use as drugs and also compounds from the environment that could have carcinogenic effects and can cause cancer. At one point, I was studying about 80 different chemicals with these affects.

Things can be good or bad for you depending on how much you take. That’s how the father of toxicology defines it. Everything could be toxic depending on the dose.”

Currently James is a research scientist with the WI Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

“I do a lot of presentations if you consider that teaching,” James said. “I mentor students in summer programs whether the students are from different universities or UW-Madison. I do community talks. I consider that teaching. I’m teaching people about their health. I was working on a team where we presented health information to the community. It started to help people before the pandemic. We were using community advocates to get accurate information out to different minority communities including Black, Hispanic and Native American communities.

The research that I am doing right now is looking at hormone therapy for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. I am correlating that to metabolism. And I am working on an article for publication based on that topic.”

James is researching the impact of menopause of the development of Alzheimer’s disease.

“When women age, there is a lot of estrogen and it is implicated in the development of Alzheimer’s disease,” James said. “When women go through menopause, you’ve heard about menopause symptoms. Sometimes they will take hormone therapy to help manage those symptoms. And so in the field of research, I also wanted to look at, ‘Does this therapy help with cognition? Does it help maintain cognition in women after menopause?’ I’m analyzing data for people who use hormone therapy to look at the effect on cognition. That is what I am looking at.”

However one of the big things that James is working on is a clinical trial for a drug called lecanemab. It seems like just yesterday that the only ways to prevent or slow down the development of Alzheimer’s disease was through diet and exercise. And while these are still considered to be important in the fight against Alzheimer’s, a new generation of drugs have now been developed that can possibly slow or arrest the development of Alzheimer’s.

“Alzheimer’s is a brain disease where you have the build-up of proteins in the brain and these proteins can affect how the brain works,” James said. “It affects the functions of the brain, which is memory and stuff like orientation that get progressively worse as time goes on. The field of Alzheimer’s didn’t have treatments that can slow it down. So when people are diagnosed, they may be on drugs that help manage their symptoms. But it’s not going to change their condition. There has been a lot of research done to develop drugs that can actually modify the changes that are occurring in the brain to see if they can slow down the progression.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we heard about monoclonal antibodies that were used in the vaccinations and treatment of COVID. In essence, they would prevent the COVID virus from entering human cells where they would inflict their harm.

“Lecanemab or leqembi is a monoclonal antibody,” James said about the Alzheimer’s prevention drug. “You get a vaccine. Your body develops antibodies. You might want to think of an antibody as your body’s natural drug to combat viruses like COVID-19, for example. When you get vaccinated for the virus, you are making an antibody for something specific and that is the spike protein of the virus. It helps prevent the virus from getting into the cells of your body. Your body is made up of many cells and that is where the work is carried out inside the cells to help maintain our body’s functions. In terms of COVID, the antibodies have helped prevent the virus from getting inside the cells to disrupt the body’s functions.”

Exciting possibilities are on the horizon.

Next issue: How lecanemab works and its possible impact