Aging, Immunity and Peripheral Factors in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Edited by:

Hui Zheng, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, United States
Robert Vassar, PhD, Northwestern University, United States

Submission Status: Open | Submission Deadline: 15 December 2025

Degradation of motor neurons Molecular Neurodegeneration is presenting a new Collection on Aging, Immunity and Peripheral Factors in Neurodegenerative Diseases. The collection is invite-only.

Image credit: © KATERYNA KON/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Gettyimages

New Content Item This Collection supports and amplifies research related to SDG 3: Good Health & Well-Being.

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Meet the Guest Editors

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Hui Zheng, PhD, Baylor College of Medicine, United States

Photo of Hui Zheng Dr Hui Zheng is the Director & Professor of the Huffington Center on Aging at Baylor College of Medicine. Her laboratory has a long-standing interest in basic and translational research on Alzheimer’s disease (AD). She is known for using sophisticated mouse models and innovative approaches to probe the biology and pathophysiology of AD. Her recent efforts have expanded from neurons to glial cells and from amyloid pathology to tau and neurofibrillary tangles. Her major projects are focused on the investigation of the autophagy-lysosomal pathway and neuron-immune interaction.

Robert Vassar, PhD, Northwestern University, United States

Photo of Robert Vassar Dr Robert Vassar is the Director of the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and Davee Professor of Alzheimer Research at Northwestern University. Prior to this appointment, he co-discovered the beta-secretase enzyme, BACE1, a prime AD drug target while working at Amgen. His current research continues to investigate BACE1 and the role of inflammation in AD pathophysiology, and how the microbiome affects astrocyte activation and inflammation in AD, using a combination of biochemical, cell culture, and novel transgenic and knockout mouse models.

About the Collection

Accumulating evidence including recent cutting-edge discoveries demonstrate causal roles of aging factors and immune system in the pathophysiology of neurodegenerative diseases, highlighted by the critical effects of central and peripheral immune and metabolic pathways. Furthermore, peripheral factors such as microbiome and metabolites are also key contributors to disease pathogenesis. Based on the ISMND 2024 conference “Aging, Immunity and Peripheral Factors in Neurodegenerative Diseases” held in May 2024 in Seoul, Korea, this review series aims to elucidate emerging pathogenic pathways as they relate to disease mechanisms, as well as diagnosis and therapy.

Topics include the phagocytic roles of glial cells in neurodegenerative diseases, the impact of cellular senescence on brain aging, aggregation and spreading of RNA binding proteins, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis pathogenesis, microglia transplantation in chimeric Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia mouse models, and in vivo genome editing for retinal degeneration.

There are currently no articles in this collection.

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of invited reviews. Should you wish to submit a different article type, please read our submission guidelines to confirm that type is accepted by the journal.

Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. Please, select the appropriate Collection title “Aging, Immunity and Peripheral Factors in Neurodegenerative Diseases" under the “Details” tab during the submission stage.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer-review process. The peer-review of any submissions for which the Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.