Engineer joins fight against Alzheimer's, diabetes - RNAi

Engineer joins fight against Alzheimer's, diabetes
December 8, 2006
MSU Today
Christina Chan is using metabolic engineering and systems biology in the fight against Alzheimer?s disease and diabetes.
Using National Institutes of Health funding, Chan and an interdisciplinary team of researchers are taking a two-pronged approach to understanding and treating diseases that together contributed to the deaths of more than 300,000 Americans last year.
Working from what she calls a top-down approach, the researcher is developing mathematical models to help identify which genes and proteins are responsible for Alzheimer?s and diabetes.
Chan, an associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science, hopes that her systems biology research will lay the groundwork for software that can identify novel targets for treating these diseases from gene expression and metabolic data.
?This could be a highly effective tool to help people understand the genes or proteins causing any number of diseases,? she said. ?For example, we could identify the pathways responsible for faster growth of certain cancer cells, shut them down, and thus slow the rate of cancer metastasis.?
Chan said pharmaceutical companies could also benefit from the systems biology framework.
?If you understand how a disease develops, you can develop more targeted ways of intervening and create drugs to treat the disease with minimal toxicity,? she said.
Chan is using RNA interference to interrupt the protein production of potential genetic culprits and studying the results. ?The basic idea is to alter the genes that you determine may be involved in the diseases through the systems biology approaches and then experimentally validate if the outcome is what you expect,? she said.
Eventually, she would like to manipulate the disease-causing genes to prevent diabetes and Alzheimer?s, even in the presence of genetic predisposition and environmental causative agents.
In addition to the NIH, Chan?s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Whitaker Foundation.