Vicky Liu

Development of a novel herbal compound-formula targeting neuroinflammation

Neurodegenerative diseases are a major disease that affect older adults and have a significant impact on families, communities and health systems around the world. No treatments available to prevent or treat neurodegenerative diseases and most existing drugs have limited efficacy, partially due to their mono-target behaviour.

Well-designed combination therapies contain two or more ingredients that can act synergistically to improve efficacy, reduce toxicity, and act on multiple targets. It is therefore an ideal method to address the complex pathological events in neurodegenerative diseases.

This MRes project investigates a novel herbal formulation to reduce neuroinflammation, protect endothelial barrier and enhance neuronal survival of cells exposed to extracellular neuroinflammatory stimuli. The synergistic protection offered by the new combination therapy may further consolidate the traditional synergistic concept of herbal formulations and could lay the foundation for the development of new combination therapies against neurodegenerative diseases.

Supervisors:

Dr Xian (Phoebe) Zhou, Professor Dennis Chang, Dr Tianqing (Michelle) Liu