Dementia Alliance annually awards the Lina Mae Edwards Young Investigator Research Grant to early career scientists and researchers in North Carolina who are focusing on studying issues related to dementia care, treatment, and disease understanding and prevention.

The Lina Mae Edwards Young Investigator Research Grant is made possible by our generous partners Guardian Angel Thrift and together we are thrilled to announce the 2024 recipient – Dr. Frances Mead Bashore!

Dr. Bashore is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her funded project is dedicated to development of proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) that target the Thousand and One Kinases (TAOK) family for degradation, and evaluation of their impact on tau phosphorylation.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology is driven, in part, by the accumulation of tau protein in the brain as tangles. The formation of tau tangles is accelerated through the activity of a group of enzymes known as Thousand And One Kinases (TAOKs). To slow or prevent the activity of the TAOKs, Dr. Bashore’s research project will design and synthesize a class of molecules that harness the ability of the body to clear unwanted proteins via degradation. Dr. Bashore’s project will determine if these molecules, called PROTACs, are more effective than available inhibitors of TAOKs, and represent pre-clinical candidates in the AD pipeline.