A career in brain science was nothing Donna Wilcock could’ve imagined growing up in Sheffield, England among a family of coal miners. No one talked about doing work that has the potential to save lives.
The first “spark” igniting Wilcock’s passion for science came through a middle school teacher, Mr. Allison, whose enthusiasm for the subject was contagious. Today Wilcock, PhD, is an internationally recognized researcher in neurodegenerative disorders at the Indiana University School of Medicine and was recently honored by the Alzheimer’s Association at the largest gathering of dementia researchers and clinicians worldwide.
But that’s not what she originally set out to do. She wanted to be a veterinarian.
Ironically, it was a subpar grade in physics that blocked her path to animal science — but was good enough to pursue a medical career. Wilcock chose pharmacology rather than medical school. As a first-generation student studying at Cardiff University in Wales, she landed a summer fellowship in an epilepsy lab — her attempt to understand the disease afflicting both her mother and an aunt.
“After that, I knew I wanted to study the brain,” said Wilcock.
England had few opportunities for biomedical research, and Wilcock — along with her husband James — wanted to experience life across the pond. With one suitcase each and a couple hundred dollars from their parents, the pair set off for sunny Tampa, Florida, where Wilcock found work in an Alzheimer’s lab at the University of South Florida.
“What was going to be one or two years of just having a job and having fun turned into staying for grad school and a PhD in pharmacology and neuroscience,” said Wilcock, the Barbara and Larry Sharpf Professor of Alzheimer’s Disease Research at the IU School of Medicine.
Her shift toward dementia science came at a providential time — just as an important discovery was announced in Alzheimer’s disease.
“A paper had come out in Nature that was the first report by anybody of the potential for using antibodies to get rid of amyloid plaques in the brain,” Wilcock recalled.
Although it’s taken decades to get from there to the recent approval of the first disease-slowing drug therapies, Wilcock’s PhD mentor was working on its foundational science back in 1999 when she joined the lab.
“My PhD project ended up studying the mechanisms of how these antibodies cleared the plaques from the brain, and all of that evolved to what is now the first disease-modifying therapies.”
Persistence in research pays off
In the early 2000s, Wilcock remembers predictions of a treatment — or even a cure — for Alzheimer’s disease “in five years.” It would take over 20 before the first drug would be FDA-approved for slowing the disease in people with early stages of dementia.
“The number of conferences I would sit through with negative trial after negative trial — it felt depressing,” Wilcock said. “But with every failed trial, we learned a lesson that we took into the next trial.”
Eventually, in 2023, Wilcock found herself amid a celebratory crowd of researchers hearing, for the first time, positive trial results with lecanemab (brand name Leqembi). Soon after, a second Alzheimer’s drug from Eli Lilly and Company, donanemab (Kisunla), would also receive FDA approval.
“Everybody was just so emotional, because everyone in that room had made a contribution to get to the point we’re at now — giving that therapy to patients,” Wilcock said.
As director of the Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders at the IU School of Medicine-IU Health Neuroscience Institute, Wilcock now leads one of the nation’s largest treatment and clinical trial sites for Alzheimer’s disease.
“We’ve not found that big breakthrough that will prevent someone from getting Alzheimer’s — we haven’t found that exact switch yet — but I believe we’re on the right track,” she said. “It took 25 years to get the first therapies, but the next ones won’t take that long.”
Before coming to IU, Wilcock did postdoctoral studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and at Duke University to better understand tau tangles and inflammation in the brain. She landed her first Alzheimer’s Association grant while at Duke and then joined the University of Kentucky faculty, where she established her lab focused on vascular contributions to cognitive impairment. She later launched the blood-based biomarker core at UK’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
In 2023, Wilcock was recruited to lead the IU Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders, which encompasses the tripartite mission of clinical care, research and education.
“She’s just hit the ground running and done an amazing job,” said Bruce Lamb, PhD, executive director of the Paul and Carole Stark Neurosciences Research Institute at IU School of Medicine. “She’s built this brain health program, together with the other team members, to get these new therapeutics launched and treatments to patients. They’ve really developed a world-class program.”
Wilcock said the decision to come to IU, after 12 years at Kentucky, was a “no brainer” when she saw the investment IU was making in neuroscience.
“I have had the most exciting two years of my career here, building new programs and developing new initiatives and continuing my research with state-of-the-art technology,” she said.
Journal editor, career mentor, and mom of twins
Wilcock currently has several NIH-funded research projects, including a $3.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to study why brain swelling and brain bleeding occur in some people who receive Alzheimer’s disease therapies. She wants to make the treatments safer.
Along with her work at IU, Wilcock contributes greatly to the field through her work with the Alzheimer’s Association.
“Wilcock and her colleagues at the IU School of Medicine and the Indiana Alzheimer's Disease Research Center have made significant progress advancing our understanding of the connections between inflammation, chronic cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's and other dementias,” said Mario Carillo, PhD, chief science officer and medical affairs lead for the Alzheimer’s Association. “She has also been part of vital research to help test and develop next-generation Alzheimer’s treatments and biomarkers.”
Wilcock stays abreast of the latest research breakthroughs in her role as editor-in-chief of the association’s flagship journal, Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association. She also serves on the advisory council for the association’s International Society to Advance Alzheimer’s Research and Treatment, or ISTAART, a development program for Alzheimer’s scientists. Wilcock and Lamb cofounded the immunity and neurodegeneration professional interest area for ISTAART in 2016. During her time as the council’s chair from 2020-22, Wilcock added seats for trainees and formed new interest groups for emerging areas like sleep disturbances, along with a group specifically for mentorship of early career scientists.
“Our trainees and our junior faculty come in open-minded, and they have some really novel ideas,” Wilcock said. “It’s up to senior investigators in the field to facilitate their ability to explore those new avenues because I think that’s where our next answers will come from.”
Kate Foley, PhD, a postdoc in Wilcock’s lab, is among several lab members who moved from Kentucky to IU to continue working with their mentor.
“I basically would follow her anywhere,” said Foley. “I joined her lab with the goal of becoming an independent primary investigator, knowing that her mentorship would set me up for the best chance of success.” Along with scientific excellence, Wilcock aims to model something else: work-life balance.
“I like being able to dismiss some of the myths that still exist out there, like it’s really hard to have a family and work-life balance as an academic scientist,” Wilcock said. “That’s not true. It’s probably one of the better careers to have because you are your own boss and you set your schedule, so if your kid has a softball game, you can arrange to make it.”
Wilcock became a mom to twin daughters at the end of her postdoctoral training at Duke. They’re now turning 16. One is interested in motorsports, so moving to Indianapolis took little persuasion.
Wilcock’s colleagues praise her dedication to mentoring junior scientists in the field. Elizabeth Head, PhD, one of Wilcock’s longtime research collaborators, recently visited IU to speak at a symposium Wilcock organized for the Center for Neurodegenerative Disorders.
“Dr. Wilcock embodies all the best qualities of a collaborator — she is transparent, giving, kind and brilliant,” said Head. “She is also an inspirational mentor. She not only supports her own laboratory’s trainees at all levels, but she has supported my trainees and many other scholars both in the USA and internationally.”
