The interface between brain and blood, known as the blood-brain barrier, is more than its name suggests. It’s a boundary teeming with activity as proteins and immune cells pass to and from the brain. The blood-brain barrier itself houses a diverse community of cell types that communicate with and maintain brain health. Andrew Yang and his lab develop technologies to study these dynamic processes at the molecular level. By decoding how signals pass between the brain and periphery, their research could reveal key mechanisms driving neurodegenerative disease and inform new drug delivery strategies.
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Andrew Yang and his team are discovering an unexpected richness of communication across the brain’s barriers. His lab developed chemical biology approaches to tag and track thousands of blood proteins transiting the blood-brain barrier. This approach revealed the mechanisms of diverse protein transport across the healthy blood-brain barrier and their impairment with age. His group is pursuing ongoing research to translate these findings towards enhanced drug delivery to the central nervous system.
Yang’s lab also invented VINE-seq to create a first molecular map of the human blood-brain barrier, yielding several thought-provoking discoveries. For example, they found that 30 of the top 45 hits from genome-wide association studies for Alzheimer’s disease are expressed in human blood-brain barrier cells, suggesting their importance in disease etiology. Yang has collaborated with over 20 laboratories to use VINE-seq on hundreds of brain samples.
By revealing the molecular and immunological principles of brain-body crosstalk, research in Yang’s lab may yield powerful new therapeutic modalities to treat neurodegenerative disease.
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