Francisco Lopera Restrepo was a neurologist and professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Antioquia and even founded the Neurosciences Group of Antioquia, making him one of the most important Alzheimer’s researchers in the world. His great performance, in addition to having faced some difficulties, was motivated by his father’s tears and the death of his grandmother.
Initially, Francisco Lopera lived with his father in Colombia and after finishing high school he wanted to travel to Medellín to study medicine at the University of Antioquia, but his father did not want him to travel because he considered that he was not “smart enough to study medicine.”
Thanks to a nun at his school, Francisco’s father agreed to study medicine, not knowing that his son would become one of the most important scientists in the field of neuroscience, according to the University of Antioquia.
Who was Francisco Lopera?
Francisco Lopera was the founder of the Antioquia Neuroscience Group. He passed away on September 10, 2024, at the age of 73.
At the age of 17, Francisco Lopera decided to study medicine, with little support from his father, who considered him “not smart enough for it.”
When he finished his first year of college, he went to visit his grandmother with his father. He cried when he saw that his mother did not recognize him because she suffered from dementia, a disease for which there was no cure until then.
Faced with the scene, the then medical student promised that no grandmother would suffer from dementia. To fulfil his promise, he completed his career as a surgeon in 1979 and later graduated as a clinical neurologist at the same institution.
In 1987, Lopera traveled to Belgium to study neuropediatrics and neuropsychology at the Universite Catholique De Louvain. With the knowledge he acquired, he devoted himself to studying cases of families with Alzheimer’s in northern Antioquia and thanks to this he formed the Antioquia Neuroscience Group.
During his field work, the researcher said that they discovered that a gene was the one that caused Alzheimer’s, because they detected that several members of families in Antioquia suffered from dementia, even at 47 years of age. To prove that this dementia was caused by Alzheimer’s, they had to wait for a resident to die and donate their brain to them.
By convincing the family, they managed to transfer the brain to Boston, United States, where they confirmed that the woman had Alzheimer’s. Thanks to this, they demonstrated that 1,200 inhabitants of Antioquia suffered from familial Alzheimer’s PSEN1 E280A, dubbed the “Paisa mutation.”
What were Lopera’s contributions to Alzheimer’s?
According to Harvard Medical School professor and Lopera student Yakeel T. Quiroz, Lopera’s work helped to understand what happened with Alzheimer’s before families suffered from it, thus “opening a door to understanding the brain and biological changes that people at risk of developing the disease go through.” In other words, it gives hope that Alzheimer’s can be prevented.
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In addition, the Antioquia Neuroscience Group discovered that a woman with the “Paisa mutation” also suffered from a mutation known as APOE3, which protected her from developing the disease, as did the Christchurch gene variant. This opened up new hope against Alzheimer’s, which was its “cure,” according to Lopera’s statements.
