Neurodegenerative Disease and Neurotherapeutics Collaboratory

Our Competitive Advantage

Empowered by the distinctive One Health approach of UCI Health Affairs that transcends disciplinary boundaries, the NDN Collaboratory will comprise faculty and staff from the Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences (which includes the schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, population and public health) and UCI Health, our regional healthcare delivery system which includes the trailblazing Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute. With brilliant minds working together instead of in silos, our teams will push the boundaries of innovation and facilitate fundamental discoveries in neuroscience.

Each team has complementary skills and expertise spanning from basic discovery to translational delivery. To promote productive collaboration and maximum synergy, we will select key researchers to explore pathways and targets for therapy, analyze the contribution of different cell types, identify biomarkers to track disease progression, and ultimately develop drugs to treat neurological diseases. The exceptional quality of current UCI faculty in this field who are internationally renowned for their work in neuroscience, combined with the potential to implement future clinical trials via the core leadership team means that our research program is truly bench to bedside.

Current estimates indicate that more than 20 million Americans will suffer from a neurodegenerative disease by 2050. Diseases of the mind are particularly devastating because they rob the patient of their ability to engage with loved ones and the world around them. Despite the immense scope of this problem, there is currently little to offer in the way of treatments that change the course of the disease. Of all the organ systems of the human body, the central nervous system is by far the most complex.

Our multidisciplinary approach will apply leading-edge research tools to identify the very cells being affected in different neurological and neurodegenerative diseases by creating representative “mini-organ” models. By designing high throughput screens and using computational strategies, rooted in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we will develop new drug compounds tailored to rescue diseased cells and engineer systems for drug delivery across the blood brain barrier to the central nervous system.