Webinar: Optimal Therapeutic Intervention Timepoints for siRNA-Based Huntington’s Disease Therapies
Imaging Dopamine Deficits in Huntington’s Disease: Towards Optimal Therapeutic Intervention Timepoints for Gene Therapy

date-time 12:00 PM PST | 3:00 PM EST, November 23, 2021
Gene therapy is at the forefront of medicine that utilizes genetic materials to treat or prevent diseases, including neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s disease (HD). While dysregulation of dopamine transmission plays a key role in HD, little is known about the relationship between dopamine and the principal cause of HD, the production of mutant huntingtin protein due to the limitation on visualization of dopamine dynamics at the spatiotemporal resolution of both neuromodulator release (milliseconds) and boutons (microns).

Creative Biolabs has invited Dr. Markita Landry to walk us through how her team developed a near Infrared Catecholamine nanosensor (nIRCat) and used real-time imaging to find out what drives late-disease decreases in evoked dopamine release, and how to use these findings as optimal therapeutic intervention timepoints for siRNA-based HD therapies.

During this webinar, we will discuss the following key points:

The development of nIRCat that can be used to image “hot spots” of dopamine activity in the striatum of R6/2 HD model mice
How to use the findings as optimal therapeutic intervention timepoints for siRNA-based HD therapies
How dopaminergic projections are affected by mutant huntingtin, and whether specific targeting of these loci is important for developing gene therapy efforts

speaker Speaker

Markita Landry, PhD

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering,
Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator,
University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Markita Landry is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also on the scientific advisory board of Terramera and Chi-Botanic. Dr. Landry is a recent recipient of over 20 early career awards, including awards from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the DARPA Young Investigator program, the Beckman Young Investigator program, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the NSF CAREER award. Dr. Landry is also a Sloan Research Fellow, an FFAR New Innovator, and a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.

Dr. Landry’s current research centers on the development of synthetic nanoparticle-polymer conjugates for imaging neuromodulation in the brain, and the delivery of genetic materials into plants. The Landry lab exploits the highly tunable chemical and physical properties of nanomaterials for the creation of bio-mimetic structures, molecular imaging, and plant genome editing.

Register Link: https://www.creative-biolabs.com/gene-therapy/webinar-towards-optimal-therapeutic-intervention-timepoints-for-gene-therapy.htm

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