Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for 50-70% of cases worldwide. It affects nearly 55 million people, and 5-8% of the world's population that is over 60 years of age.

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 Recent dogma suggests that glucose metabolism and insulin signaling may play a role in disease progression. This potential relationship is informally referred to as Type III Diabetes, referring to the link between insulin signaling and glucose metabolism in the human neurovascular unit (NVU) and neurodegeneration.

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One of the major hurdles to better understanding and studying the human NVU is the lack of human-relevant physiological models. As such, we strive with this research to develop an automatic, modular, high-throughput NVU linkage system, with which we will assess the effect of insulin signaling and glucose metabolism on neurodegeneration in the human NVU.

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Our research has determined a positive correlation between blood-brain-barrier (BBB) cell co-culture and barrier integrity. We have developed a robotic pipetting system that better recapitulates the dynamic cellular relationships experienced in the NVU in vivo.

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We are developing a method of inducing insulin resistance in iPSC derived neurons, and results thus far indicate changes in GLUT3 expression.