Dr Soyon Hong on investigating microglia and the importance of collaboration within her lab
Dr Soyon Hong (Group Leader, UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL) is a specialist in the relationship between microglia and synapses. Her lab explores these interactions in a disease context.
Dr Soyon Hong remembers when she first came across microglia cells as an undergraduate student.
“I fell in love with them,” she recalls. “They were my first love, actually.”
It is a love affair that has never subsided. Today Soyon’s lab is at the forefront of dementia research, with a primary focus on the microglia cell.
“Microglia are the immune cells of the brain. They are like your first responders. They detect and respond, restoring homeostasis.”
But in times of degeneration, this protective function can break down, and the ‘first responders’ can actually engulf, or ‘eat’, surrounding synapses. It is a process that is evident in Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia. The disease affects one in 14 people over the age of 65 and one in six people over the age of 80.
“My team are finding ways to target malfunctioning microglia, which may help slow down the progression of Alzheimer’s,” Soyon says. “What are some of the regulators and what are some of the triggers that mediate this process?”
She points out however that in order to understand this breakdown, we must also investigate healthy microglia functioning as well.
“Their function is crucial not only in times of damage, but now we’re beginning to understand that microglia are also critical in normal brain development as well.”
“If we want to understand how brains degenerate, we have to know how brains function.”
Earlier this year, Soyon was announced as the recipient of the Alzheimer’s Research UK (ARUK) David Hague award for Early Career Investigator of the Year.
“Receiving this award is an honour and is so encouraging for me and my team who are just starting their careers in dementia research,” she says.
Working to find a cure for Alzheimer’s is also important on a profoundly personal level.
Soyon's father, the person who inspired her to pursue a career in science, passed away due to Alzheimer’s disease-related complications just one week before she moved to the UK to start her lab.
Her mother also endured severe chronic illness for much of her life, often experiencing pain without explanation or prescribed treatment pathways. It motivated Soyon to seek answers.
“I realised there’s so much unknown about our bodies. In my mind, the way to help someone like my mum was through science.”
Soyon also credits two books that profoundly shaped her career choice. One is The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing some of the case histories of his patients.
“That really blew my hat off,” she laughs. “It made me really fall in love with neuroscience.”
The other is Tuesdays With Morrie, a memoir by Mitch Albom, profiling his mentor who is dying from ALS. While Soyon admits it made her bawl her eyes out, it also inspired her to persist through years of study and training.
Soyon’s lab is made up of postdoctoral, graduate, PhD and master’s students, as well as lab technicians and research staff. And while the length of time they’re at the lab may vary, one ritual stays the same.
“One of the things we always do when we recruit new people to the lab, is everyone meets the candidate, and the candidate meets everybody,” Soyon says. “For me that’s really important.”
"It’s not only about being nice. Nowadays, the way that biomedical research is being done, it requires collaboration. And that collaboration can be between labs, between institutions, but most of the time it’s a concerted team effort within a lab.”
Just as different cell types work together to enable healthy brain function, the different members of Soyon’s lab co-exist and support each other to thrive.
“Everybody in my lab has their own project, their own specific question that they’re addressing. It’s important because it empowers them to have ownership. However what is also important is everyone helping each other out.”
“I want our efforts to be used to change people’s lives.”
For Soyon and her lab, that ‘change’ is developing a cure, or disease-modifying therapy, for neurodegenerative diseases.
“We hope the discoveries we make in the lab will make a fundamental difference in our understanding of how the brain works. Ultimately, we want to find new drug targets that could be new life-changing treatments for people with dementia.”
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Biography
Dr Soyon Hong received her PhD in Neuroscience in 2012 from Harvard University and completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in 2018. While in this latter role, she conducted a study that was among the first to propose microglia as critical players in synaptic pathology in disease.
She now brings these expertise and knowledge to establish a new UK DRI lab group at UCL.