Home Department: Biology
Mentor: Tony Wyss-Coray, Neurology & Neurological Sciences

The Blood Brain Barrier (BBB), a semipermeable barrier between the central nervous system and the blood, has been implicated in several neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, and has posed an issue to effective Central Nervous System (CNS) drug delivery. Ryan aims to help catalog a list of proteins that can cross the BBB and identify them through mass spectrometry. A deeper understanding of these BBB proteins could clarify brain aging and neurodegenerative disease progression and reveal BBB transporters as “Trojan horse” shuttles for CNS drug delivery.