Lary Walker is an American neuroscientist and researcher in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. He is Professor Emeritus at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia where he was Associate Director of the Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. He is known for his research on the role of abnormal proteins in the causation of Alzheimer's disease.
Walker received his Bachelor of Science degree from Louisiana State University and his Master of Science and PhD degrees from Tulane University. Following a German Academic Exchange (DAAD) Fellowship at the University of Kassel and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University, he moved to the Neuropathology Laboratory of Donald L. Price at Johns Hopkins University, where he began work on the biological basis of Alzheimer's disease. In 1995 he became head of the Alzheimer's disease drug discovery program at Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 2003 he returned to Emory University where he was the Marie and E.R. Snelling Professor of Neurology until transitioning to emeritus status in 2020.
Walker's early research established that a variety of neurons are involved in the formation of Aò plaques, one of the pathological hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. With Dale Schenk at Athena Neurosciences (later part of ÃÂlan Pharmaceuticals), he discovered that antibodies to the Aò protein can enter the brain from the cerebrospinal fluid and selectively bind to Aò plaques and cerebral Aò-amyloid angiopathy (CAA). Based on his work with animal models of Alzheimer's disease, Walker has proposed that humans are uniquely vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease.
Since the late 1990s, Walker's research has been directed toward the mechanisms underlying the misfolding and aggregation of the Aò protein in the brain. In collaboration with Mathias Jucker at the University of Tübingen, he discovered that the accumulation of Aò can be initiated in transgenic mouse models by a prion-like mechanism in which 'seeds' of abnormal Aò precipitate the formation of plaques and CAA. In 2000, Walker and Harry LeVine introduced the term 'proteopathy' (also known as 'proteinopathy') to describe diseases characterized by the misfolding and aggregation of proteins. This terminology has been applied to a number of neurodegenerative disorders and amyloidoses, including tauopathies such as Pick's disease, synucleinopathies such as Parkinson's disease and Lewy Body Dementia, systemic amyloidoses, and others.
Walker received the Metlife Foundation Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease in 2014, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2016, and the Peter Bassoe Lectureship of the American Neuropsychiatric Association in 2017.