Tara Moore

Dr. Moore received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Calgary and her doctorate in Anatomy and Neurobiology from this department in 2000. She is currently the Director of the Laboratory of Interventions for Cortical Injury and Cognitive Decline.

Dr. Moore’s primary research focus is the assessment of cognitive and motor function impairments in our rhesus monkey models of cortical injury and aging and the underlying neurobiological basis for these impairments. In both models, she assessing the efficacy of an exciting new therapeutic, mesenchymal stromal cell derived extracellular vesicles (MSC-EVs), to reverse deficits in cognitive and motor function by decreasing neuroinflammation and myelin pathology.

Her model of cortical injury involves training monkeys on our tasks of fine motor function of the hand, neurosurgical lesion production in primary motor cortex, assessment of recovery of fine motor function and post-perfusion analysis of blood, CSF and brain and spinal cord tissue. This model is used to establish the rate and degree of recovery of function following cortical injury in the aged brain and to investigate the neurobiological basis for recovery. Further, she is assessing the efficacy of MSC-EVs as a restorative treatment to facilitate recovery of function following cortical injury. This work is being conducted in collaboration with researchers at the Henry Ford Health System and the University of Buffalo. To date, she has demonstrated that administration of MSC-EVs, facilitates a complete recovery of fine motor function in the first 3-4 weeks after injury. Further, MSC-EVs reduce injury-induced neuroinflammation, synapse loss, oligodendrocyte damage and myelination deficits. Finally, a recent collaborative proteomic study showed that proteins from MSC-EVs are involved in signaling pathways related to complement signaling, protein dynamics, and extracellular matrix stabilization, that may be involved in ameliorating injury-related neurodegeneration, inflammation and plasticity.

In her aging study, she is administering MSC-EVs to aged monkeys to determine their efficacy in slowing or reversing age-related cognitive decline. After a period of 18 months of treatment, treated monkeys show significant improvement in spatial working memory. Further, treated animals showed increased white matter structural integrity on MRI and a preservation of inter-network functional connectivity as measured by resting-state functional MRI. Currently studies involve assessing treatment related changes in blood and CSF biomarkers of inflammation and oxidative damage and changes in neuroinflammation and myelin pathology in brain tissue.

Finally, she is in the early stages of developing a rhesus monkey model of hypertension (HT), using the well-established “one kidney-one clip” model of hypertension used in rodents. With this model, she will establish the effect of HT of cognitive function in middle-aged rhesus monkey and how HT alters the inflammation and myelin integrity in the aged brain.

Dr. Moore is the Associate Dean for Research, ad interim and the Director of the graduate program MS in Forensic Anthropology. She teaches Professional Skills and Human Anatomy and Osteology in the Forensic Anthropology program and Neurobiology of Aging in the department of Anatomy and Neurobiology. Dr. Moore is also the Vice-Chair of the Institutional Animal Use and Care Committee..

Lab: Laboratory of Interventions for Cortical Injury and Cognitive Decline

CV: Tara Moore, Ph.D.– CV