There’s a superhero in disguise who has set her roots in Park City. An historic home on Park Ave, nights at Flanigans on Main, standing reservations at Katchu Shabu — she’s the picture of a Parkite, a cheerful host and known for her holiday gifts of tins of homemade cookies. 

But when duty calls, Dr. Donna Cross makes the commute down Parleys Canyon into the labs at the University of Utah. Her mission? The discovery of a cure to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

Brilliant since the beginning, Cross started as an engineer, wanting to build spaceships.

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“​​My undergrad was aerospace engineering at University of Michigan. And when I was a junior in college, the Challenger blew up, so when I graduated a year later, there weren’t any jobs,” she said.

She got a run-of-the-mill engineer job and did the mom thing, meanwhile pursuing her equestrian career, almost going to the Olympics. One day, after watching a show where neuroscientists worked with engineers to help spinal cord injury patients walk, she felt a calling.

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“I just thought, ‘Okay, this is what I want to do. I want to go back to school, I want to become a neuroscientist or neurologist and I want to work on problems with the central nervous system in the brain in particular,'” she said. 

She began looking for PhD programs in neuroscience and applied to one at the University of Michigan.

“About the time I got accepted into the program, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease,” she said. “And my grandmother would say to me, ‘Donna, you need to hurry up and find a cure before I’m dead.'”

Her research suddenly became personal, and she got connected with ​​Satoshi Minoshima, MD, PhD, who would become her lifelong mentor. Together, the two began researching the application of brain imaging as a tool for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

Alzheimer’s disease, a memory loss affliction that involves the loss of existing memories and the inability to form new memories, is still a relative mystery for researchers, said Cross, and while researchers know some of the reasons it happens, they still don’t have all the answers.  

The more they can understand how the disease works, the more they can explore ways of treating and hopefully curing it.

When researching a disease, scientists determine pathology — or the possible reasons, causes and indicators of the disease. For Alzheimer’s, researchers have identified certain proteins that are found in an infected brain as two pathologies, said Cross, but there’s more to discover. If pathology is the whole recipe, these proteins are ingredients, but scientists are still looking into the method.

Cross’ work with brain imaging has allowed them to identify more information about the way this disease presents in a living brain.

“We can take a brain scan from a dementia patient, and we can compare it to a group of age-matched — so, same-age, normal — subjects, and we can say ‘Oh, this dementia patient has reduced brain activity in these particular regions,'” Cross said. This shows a pattern so clear in regular cases that anyone could learn to identify it in a matter of minutes, she said, thanks to the programs developed by Minoshima.

They began to recognize that connecting parts of the brain were malfunctioning in these patients. If the cell body is a factory where proteins and other products are made, those goods are transported along axons, or the brain’s train tracks, and delivered to the synapses, where neurons connect to other neurons and brain activity occurs. For patients with Alzheimer’s, Cross said, the transport system is part of what is being disrupted, the trains derailed.

“It led me to hypothesize that if we were to therapeutically treat some aspect of this transport process that maybe we could help treat the actual disease process,” Cross said.

They started by experimenting with mice genetically bred to develop Alzheimer’s and tested them through standard short- and long-term memory challenges. They administered a drug, used as a cancer drug, to the mice’s brains through the nose and began to show promising results addressing the memory loss symptoms in the animals, Cross said.

Most of this was going on in Seattle, where Cross had lived, completed her PhD and become faculty at the University of Washington. But after her mentor moved to Utah to head up the Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the University of Utah, Cross felt convinced to continue her research here.

Along with colleagues Jindrich Kopeček, PhD, also known as Henry, and Jiyuan Yang, PhD, also known as Jane, Cross continued experimenting with the drug. Kopeček and Yang tweaked the drug, adding proteins that allowed them to use it in smaller amounts administered through the veins, Cross said. 

“We’ve been testing it out now for two or three years, and it’s like a complete reversal of the memory problems that we see in the mice,” she said. 

The hope, Cross said, is that the drug can both stop the loss of existing memories and restart the ability to create new memories. But the other part is addressing the anxiety experienced by patients with these types of dementias.

“Anybody who’s taking care of somebody with Alzheimer’s disease, psychiatric symptoms are a very big caregiver concern. They, Alzheimer’s patients, often get agitated and anxious, and there’s a lot of paranoia and a lot of hoarding,” Cross said. “The memory issues are sad, but it’s the psychiatric issues that actually give the most amount of trouble to caregivers.”

And for her, this comes from experience. Not long after moving to Utah and settling in Park City, Cross’ father-in-law was diagnosed with dementia and came to live with her and her husband.

“We were a caregiver for him. We’ve had to put him in a facility. He just turned 90 the other day,” Cross said. “He’s very agitated. He gets aggressive. He gets anxious. If the ladies at the nursing home come in to clean his room, he thinks they’re stealing his underwear. It’s incredibly hard to see this happen to someone, not only just somebody you care about, but anyone you know.”

Cross and her team are closing in on clinical trials, she said — about $2 million in funding away. There’s so much hope in the progress they’ve made, she said, but for her, it’s bittersweet: This drug has the potential to help so many people, but it’s too late for Cross’ grandmother and father-in-law.

“(My father-in-law) also would say to me, ‘Donna, you need to fix me pretty soon,'” Cross said. “Even though this has taken me probably 13, 14 years now, and we’re really closing in on clinical trials and really being able to help people, I still haven’t been able to help the people that I wanted to help the most.”

That thought makes it hard to take that drive into the office some days, Cross admitted, and it’s the community that she’s found in Park City that helps keep her going.

“I have this whole friend group, they’re my cheerleaders so to speak, on days when I’m like, ‘Oh, I just want to retire. I can’t take this anymore.’ So it’s the community that provides the emotional support to me to see this through,” she said.

Her work is personal for the individuals living here in the Wasatch Back, she’s found.

“People here are generally healthy, and they tend to live longer. And that’s good news. But old age is the greatest risk factor for dementia. So the older you live, the older your brain gets, the more likely you are to have some sort of early dementing disorder or dementia,” Cross said. “Inevitably people say to me, ‘I have a mother, I have a sister, I have an in-law with dementia, and what you are doing is so important to us.'”

While Cross never got to build spaceships, she’s dedicated her life to exploring a similar frontier.

“It’s the external unknown versus the internal unknown,” Cross said. “Why do we know more about a galaxy, a different galaxy than we know about the workings of our own brain?”

And, that start as an engineer has, in many ways, made her discoveries possible.

“I think the real difference between myself and a lot of other scientists is because I did start out, and in some part of me still am, an engineer,” she said. “Engineers like to fix things. … I just see something like Alzheimer’s disease and I say, ‘The brain is malfunctioning. What can we do to fix it?'”

Finally, she has a message of hope and a word of encouragement to the people holding tightly to loved ones, the caregivers sacrificing 24/7. 

“There are people like me, going into the office every day and trying as hard as they can to provide a solution,” she said.

It almost wouldn’t have been possible without the love and encouragement she’s received, too.

“I think it’s synergistic, where I talk to people and they provide support for me to keep going and keep working on this project. And I’m taking this as far as I can to a clinical trial,” she said. “I return that back to them by saying, ‘OK, well, I’m doing this for you, too, because this is hope for the future.’ Ultimately, that’s what community is.”

And her research is just one of the ways she gives back to the Park City community she loves so dearly. Another? Baked goods during the holidays.

“I baked 947 cookies last year,” said Cross with a laugh, confessing to having a spreadsheet. “It’s my gift back to the people who take such good care of us.”

Learn more about Cross, the work she and her colleagues are doing and her upcoming lectures by following @UofURadiology on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). Odds are, you might bump into Cross and her husband on Main Street one of these days. And, if you’re lucky, you may receive a little goodie bag of cookies from her yourself this holiday season.