Keyword: Alzheimer's disease

Melanie Alpaugh

The Alpaugh Lab studies the mechanisms and consequences of protein misfolding in neurodegenerative diseases.
Theme 1- Interactions between the blood-brain barrier and misfolded proteins. Protein accumulation and blood-brain barrier break down are common features of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. We aim to understand if these two common disease features are related using a human 3D-cell culture model of the blood-brain barrier and human tissue.
Theme 2- Contributions of huntingtin seeding and spreading to Huntington’s disease. The mutant huntingtin protein displays prion-like properties. The Alpaugh lab is tackling the relevance to Huntington’s disease using tissue from human patients with Huntington’s disease phenocopies and Huntington’s disease.

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Ray Lu

My lab focuses on two main axes of research:
1) Unfolded Protein Response and Human Diseases: We study proteins that play key roles in animal stress responses, specifically the Unfolded Protein Response (UPR), which has been linked to animal development, cell differentiation, as well as a variety of human diseases such as Alzheimer’s, diabetes, cancer and viral infection.
2) Molecular Mechanisms of Aging: We are working to establish planarians as a new aging model to test the hypothesis that longevity requires multiplex resistance to stress. We hope to identify genes or alleles that confer such multiplex stress resistance and/or promote longevity.

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