Drug Disc Neurodegenerative

Catalog description

The goal of this graduate level course is to examine the drug discovery process with focus on neurodegenerative disorders. Using Alzheimer’s disease for illustration, we will examine diagnosis, epidemiology, current therapeutics, strategies for drug discovery (amyloid hypothesis, tau, apo E, insulin, and various receptors) in vitro and in vivo disease models. We will examine the in vivo models to see how well they simulate the disease and thus how reliable they may be in translational studies. Although the focus of the course is on preclinical studies, we will examine how some of the compounds that have done well in preclinical studies have fared in clinical studies thus illustrating challenges in this field.