Prevention & Therapeutics

Conquering the cognitive impact of infectious disease.

This team, catalyzed by the recruitment of Kun Ping Lu from Harvard in January 2022, has extensive experience defining early biodiagnostics for predicting susceptibility to memory loss in dementia. The Prevention and Therapeutics team has extensive experience in identifying novel therapeutic targets in traumatic brain injury and Alzheimer’s disease (Lu); personalized medicine, including identifying and caring for patients at risk for toxicity or subtherapeutic benefit from drugs in clinical use, including for neurodegenerative diseases and inflammatory conditions; (Richard Kim), molecular and systems bases of diseases including novel diagnostic, prognostic or therapeutic strategies for complex human diseases (Vania Prado, Shun-Cheng Li); and streamlined, innovative approaches to clinical trials, leveraging big data resources, and utilizing population health services (Amit Garg).

This team is conducting pharmaco-kinetic and -dynamic analyses of approved antivirals, anti-inflammatory, and immunomodulatory drugs that may stave off cognitive decline first in animal models and then in cognitive impairment cohorts post COVID-19. They will lead clinical trials and pharmacologic analyses for re-purposed drugs and will use information on key neuroinflammatory pathways leading to cognitive decline (from mechanistic and approved therapeutic analyses, discovered by the Brain Health, Viral Triggers and Inflammatory Responses teams) to support the drug screening, design, and development of new targeted biotherapeutics.