Midlife obesity and diabetes substantially increase the risk of dementia, but the mechanisms are unknown. In my current position in the Merkle laboratory I am attempting to understand the influence of obesity and diabetes on neurodegenerative processes and how these could be exploited to identify tractable drug targets
My research strategy has three components:
1) Understanding mechanisms that connect obesity and diabetes to neurodegeneration
2) Repurposing ?old? drugs as new treatments for dementia
3) New methods for automated and unbiased in vivo validation of new therapeutics
I primarily work with prion-induced neurodegenerative models combined with automated behavioural testing and ?omics? technologies, including RNA-sequencing, lipidomics and peptidomics, as well as biochemistry, histology, multivariate analysis and machine learning.
