Sabine Gilch

Sabine Gilch

Pronouns: she/her

Positions

Professor

Faculty of Veterinary Medicine

Full Member

Hotchkiss Brain Institute

Full Member

The Calvin, Phoebe and Joan Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases

Adjunct Professor

Cumming School of Medicine, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Contact information

Web presence

Phone number

Office: +1 (403) 210-7578

Location

Office: HRIC2C60
Lab: HRIC2C45

Background

Educational Background

Doctor of Philosophy Molecular Biotechnology, Munich Technical University, 2009

M.Sc. Molecular Biotechnology, Munich Technical University, 2008

B.Sc. Molecular Biology, Johannes Gutenberg U (Mainz), 2006

Research

Areas of Research

Prion and prion-like diseases

Prions are fascinating infectious agents and strikingly dierent from viruses and bacteria since they only consist of a misfolded version of a host protein and replicate without using encoding nucleic acids. Instead, prions propagate by inducing conformational changes in the cellular prion protein, which makes it prone to aggregation. Misfolded prion protein accumulates in brain cells and results in neuronal death. Prion diseases are strictly fatal neurodegenerative disorders of humans (e.g. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) and animals, such as BSE or mad cow disease, scrapie in sheep and goat, and chronic wasting disease (CWD) of wild and farmed cervids. They can occur sporadically, upon mutations in the prion protein gene, or by transmission within the same or between dierent species. Our research focuses on understanding the impact of prion infection on cholesterol metabolism and endocytic tracking in neurons, with the goal to define new targets for treatment of prion disease using prion-infected primary neurons, cell lines and mouse models. We investigate whether CWD has the potential to transmit to humans, and how CWD prion strains arise from allelic variants of the cervid prion protein using biochemical, biophysical and in vivo characterization in transgenic and knock-in mouse models of CWD our lab has generated.

 

Participation in university strategic initiatives

Courses

Course number Course title Semester
VM324 Molecular Biology and Genetics
VM422 Virology
CMMB 421 Virology
MDSC 674.02 Molecular, Cellular and Microbial Biology and Immunology

Projects

New Frontiers in Research Funds, Explorations competition “Establishing a cervid derived stem cell-based infection model for chronic wasting disease prions” 2021 - 2023

National Institutes of Health “Redefining the zoonotic potential of chronic wasting disease” 2021 - 2026

Canadian Institutes of Health Research “Targeting brain cholesterol homeostasis to counteract prion diseases” 2020 - 2025

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada “The role of prion heterogeneity on transmission and transport” 2019 - 2024

Awards

  • UCalgary Research Excellence Chair, University of Calgary. 2023
  • Canada Research Chair in Prion Disease Research (Tier 2), 2018
  • University of Calgary PEAK Scholar, University of Calgary. 2017
  • Canada Research Chair in Prion Disease Research (Tier 2), 2013

Publications