For the millions of people worldwide who suffer from psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia, Carleton Professor Maria DeRosa’s next research initiative provides hope for a new treatment.
DeRosa is one of 10 Carleton professors honoured with a university Research Achievement Award for her innovative research.
DeRosa has won major awards for her research that looks at how single-stranded pieces of synthetic DNA called aptamers can be used to combat everything from diseases to environmental contaminants.
“Aptamers act like antibodies, but with the added advantages of being more chemically robust, less expensive to generate and more easily modified for a range of applications, including medicine,” says DeRosa.
She plans on using the $15,000 honorarium from her Carleton award to develop a DNA aptamer for the neurotransmitter dopamine and generate a strategy to deliver this aptamer across the blood-brain barrier. Dopamine helps to regulate motor behaviour, emotion, motivation, reward, memory and learning. This work will be done in collaboration with Carleton neuroscience Professor Matthew Holahan.
“We know that functional abnormalities have been implicated in various psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases, most commonly, Parkinson’s disease and schizophrenia,” says DeRosa. “For these reasons, dopamine is a high-priority target for the development of an aptamer for biosensing and therapeutics. In the short term, this work will provide innovative new tools for studying the brain at the molecular level. Inthe long term, this research may serve as the underpinning for a drug discovery program with the potential to produce novel aptamer-based therapeutics for a variety of mental health conditions.”
DeRosa is a Carleton alumna and part of a group of chemists working in the emerging field of nanoscience and nanotechnology.