Understanding dementia one molecule at a time
Dr Amandeep Kaur, University of Sydney Fellow at Sydney Nano, won 2nd prize in the 2020 IMPACT pitch competition was organised by the Sydney Early-Mid Career Academic Network (SEMCAN) for all Early and Mid-Career Academics to present their research and its potential impact to a wider community.
Her pitch was about "Understanding dementia one molecule at a time".
Dementia is a disease in which there is loss of memory and the ability to perform everyday activities. Someone in the world develops dementia every 3 seconds and it is the second leading cause of death in Australia. In patients with dementia abnormal proteins clump together and deposit in the brain. These large deposits are called plaques. Imagine a sentence with all incorrectly spelt words, to understand the meaning of the sentence we need to go back to the individual words and correct them one word at a time, similarly to understand the plaques in the brain of dementia patients we need to study the incorrectly folded protein one molecule at a time. It is very hard to study these proteins because their size is in the nanometre scale which is 10,000 times smaller than the width of human hair. To overcome this difficulty. I develop small molecular sensors which emit light when they come in contact with misfolded proteins, a property called fluorescence. So in a dark and crowded biological tissue, This is like handing a torch to individual protein molecules and studying their behaviour and interactions. My vision is to share these sensors with biomedical researchers, opening new doors to molecular-level information currently beyond reach, and direct the development of effective therapies, saving more than 900 billion dollars globally.
More about Pitch Perfect competition here
