Episode Details

What if the blood vessels in your brain aren't just collateral damage in Alzheimer's disease, but part of the cause?

Dr. Rachel Bennett, associate professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, is challenging one of the field's longest-held assumptions. In this episode, she joins host Deborah Westfall to break down her groundbreaking research on the relationship between tau pathology and vascular dysfunction, and why the future of Alzheimer's science may look nothing like what we expect today.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

• Why vascular changes in Alzheimer's disease were historically treated as secondary damage, and why that thinking is shifting
• How Dr. Bennett's lab discovered that tau pathology alone can drive abnormal changes in blood vessel structure
• The thick-tissue imaging technique that revealed something thin slides had been missing for decades
• What 47 meters of blood vessels in a single brain fold tells us about the scale of this problem
• Why the field may be drastically underestimating the number of distinct Alzheimer's disease subtypes
• How AI and spatial transcriptomics are accelerating discoveries that would have taken years under traditional funding timelines
• The critical role of philanthropic funding for early-career researchers, and why smaller, faster grants can outperform traditional NIH timelines

About Dr. Rachel Bennett

Dr. Rachel Bennett is an associate professor at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and a 2024 and 2025 Toffler Scholar. She runs the Bennett Alz Lab, which focuses on vascular contributions to Alzheimer's disease using cutting-edge imaging techniques including light sheet microscopy, in vivo two-photon microscopy, and spatial transcriptomics. She completed her PhD at Washington University in St. Louis studying traumatic brain injury and microglia, and her postdoctoral training in the lab of Dr. Bradley Hyman at MGH.

Resources and Links

• Bennett Alz Lab: bennettallzlab.com
• Connect with Dr. Bennett on LinkedIn
• Karen Toffler Charitable Trust: karrentoffler.org
• Massachusetts Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (Massachusetts ADRC)
• Research referenced: Acta Neuropathologica (tau and vascular accumulation study)

If this episode opened your eyes to a new side of Alzheimer's research, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share it with someone who cares about brain health, and subscribe so you never miss an episode of Research Renaissance.

To learn more about the breakthroughs discussed in this episode and to support ongoing research, visit our website at tofflertrust.org.

Technical Podcast Support by Jon Keur at Wayfare Recording Co.