Francisco Lopera, a Colombian doctor who dedicated more than half of his life to understanding Alzheimer’s and finding a cure, died on Tuesday. The dedicated researcher studied this degenerative disease in a level of detail that few scientists have done, and for this reason his research was recognized internationally: in 2020 he became the only Latin American to win the prestigious Bengt Winblad Lifetime Achievement Award, and this year he received the Potamkin Prize, known as the Nobel Prize for Alzheimer’s research. Lopera was for decades director of the Neurosciences Group at the University of Antioquia, which today announced that the great researcher has died. “Today we say goodbye to an invaluable human being, a rigorous professional, an inspiring professor, and a curious and creative researcher who forged a path in the fight against Alzheimer’s,” the institution wrote when announcing the news. Born in 1951 in Santa Rosa de Osos, municipality of Antioquia, Lopera died at the age of 73, due to cancer.
In an interview published by the University of Antioquia, Lopera said that at the beginning of his career, when he decided to dedicate himself to Alzheimer’s, his colleagues told him that he was getting into a lost cause. “That one is getting into a lost area, where one has no chance of success, because they are orphan diseases, with no solution, no cure, for which one can do very little. However, what I have learned is that one can do a lot,” he said. “On the contrary: it is where one is most needed, where one can do the most, it is where the community is most grateful,” he added.
Antioquia has always been Lopera’s home. In this department, crossed by the Andean mountain range, there is a town called Yarumal where 25 families suffer from genetic or hereditary Alzheimer’s: more than 6,000 members with the so-called “Paisa mutation” have participated in the research that Lopera led from the University of Antioquia. “Colombia has the largest population of genetic Alzheimer’s in the world and Yarumal has the largest in Colombia,” the scientist told El PAÍS in an interview two years ago. Genetic Alzheimer’s is only 1% of the total cases of the disease, but Lopera’s research was aimed at curing this and the other type, the so-called sporadic variant. “We believe that what is discovered in the genetic form is applicable to the population that will suffer from the sporadic form because the symptoms are the same, what varies is the origin. In the genetic form we know that it develops due to a mutation of a gene, in the sporadic form the cause is still not clear,” he added.
In his later years he focused a lot on the case of Aliria Rosa Piedrahíta, the only woman in the world who had the genetic mutation for Alzheimer’s, but had not developed symptoms, unlike several members of her family in the mountains of Antioquia. “Her case was a natural experiment. We realized that her brain was protected by a mutation that prevented the disease from developing,” Lopera said of the strange double mutation. “We found that she was a carrier of the Presenilin 1 gene, the e280a mutation, which made her sick, and the APOE 3 Christchurch mutation, that protected her,” he added. The doctor devoted much of his later years to searching for ways to mimic the mechanism of the protective gene in the brain.
In an interview with the magazine ChangeWhen asked how he would like to be remembered, Lopera said he wanted to be seen as “someone who did his homework.” Someone who dedicated more than 40 years to science, who was surprised by everything he found in the mountains of Antioquia, who worked intensely to solve a disease that affects more than 40 million people. He even appreciated the years in which he did clinical trials that failed, he explained, because they showed “where things were not going.” A doctor who suddenly did not find the magic recipe for the disease, but wanted to be remembered as someone who “managed to visualize where the cure and prevention of Alzheimer’s is. Whether it takes us a while to achieve it is another thing, that is already a task for many researchers.” With his departure, generations of students from the University of Antioquia, which Lopera directed for decades, will continue with the difficult task. As the institution wrote in its farewell statement: “we will keep his name high and continue his inspiring legacy.”
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