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.

Learn More

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.

Learn More

Scott Ryan

While animal models have lead to huge advancements in our understanding of neurobiology, there is controversy over whether overexpression/silencing of gene expression is representative of diverse disease states. Indeed, the lack of availability of primary human neurons has made evaluating the pathological consequences of genomic mutations arduous. The use of human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) technology overcomes these limitations by providing a source of human neurons from both normal and disease genetic backgrounds. We currently focus on stem cell based models of Parkinson's Disease (PD) to study how mitochondrial stress mechanisms impact on neuronal function in human disease.

Learn More
Scroll to Top