Research
Drug Discovery for Alzheimer’s Disease
No cure is currently available for Alzheimer’s disease. Seeking therapeutic agents capable of slowing disease progression is one of the current top priorities for scientists. In this regard, several approaches have been pursued from different angles. Mounting evidence indicates that the molecular pathological abnormality starts about 5-15 years before the onset of the clinical symptoms. My research is oriented to find some compounds able to prevent the non-toxic monomers from aggregating/polymerizing/cross-linking into toxic high molecular weight species. To achieve this goal, two approaches have been pursued in the laboratory.
Non-conjugated FRET technique
We recently discovered that non-conjugated FRET pairs from our small library are able to differentiate monomers from toxic high molecular weight species. We are applying this technique to seek compounds that are able to stop the aggregation/polymerization at the initial stage.
“Smart” fluorescence probes measure the inhibition
We are taking advantage of our discovered imaging probe to measure the inhibitory effect of compounds. We have found that some of our probes have a high sensitivity towards monomers and we will attempt to screen the compounds’ inhibitory effect by measuring the decreasing fluorescence intensity.