Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program Round 4 – 2008

Vijay Pande, Chemistry
Isabella Graef, Pathology

Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Disease are members of a particularly challenging class of diseases.  One aspect they have in common is that the development of small molecule therapeutics (i.e. orally available drugs) is particularly challenging since these drugs would have to break up the interactions between proteins.  The goal of our work is to develop a general method to tackle these diseases, using Alzheimer’s Disease as a driving biological problem.  If successful, we would be able to produce interesting new lead compounds as potential new therapeutics for Alzheimer’s Disease.  Moreover, we would have developed a new paradigm for the discovery and application of small molecules to a broad class of diseases.