Field for Brain Health and PreventionDepartment of Innovative Neurodiagnostic Technologies

Previously:Department of Integrated Neuroscience
Center for Integrated Human Brain Science Website

Members

Assist. Prof.
Yukimi NAKAMURA
Specially Appointed Assoc. Prof.
Naruhiko SAHARA
Specially Appointed Assist. Prof.
Tomoki MITANI

Research Focus

In collaboration with the Department of Clinical and Translational Brain Research, we are advancing basic research focused on psychiatric and neurological disorders. The main research themes are, the development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches for psychiatric and neurological disorders, the development of novel diagnostic technologies targeting factors involved in the regulation of brain homeostasis, the evaluation of neuroinflammation in neurodegenerative diseases, the development of mouse models of neurological diseases.

This research field focuses on the development of mouse models that recapitulate the pathology of human brain disorders, as well as the preclinical evaluation of diagnostic and therapeutic agents. The lower panel illustrates the process of protein aggregation across multiple biological scales, from proteins and cells to whole organisms.
One of the pathological hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases is the formation of protein aggregates. Recent near-atomic-resolution structural analyses of these aggregates have revealed the binding sites of PET ligands (upper panel). In addition, based on the fibrillar structures, the development of PET ligands is being advanced through docking simulations (lower panel).
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