Jun
20
June Café Scientifique
Posted by: Cafe Scientifique Vancouver | June 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Dear Café Scientifiquers,
Our next café will happen next Tuesday, June 28 at 7:30pm @ The Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir Street). That evening, we will host Gelareh Mazarei, a PhD Candidate at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics. Her talk that evening will be on Huntington’s disease:
Solving the Mystery of Huntington’s disease
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a devastating brain disorder that affects ~ 1 in 10,000 Canadians. Individuals with HD develop physical and mental disabilities that progress towards complete disability and eventual death. The part of the brain that predominantly gets affected in HD patients is the striatum, which controls our planning and abstract thinking. Currently, there are no treatments for HD due to the lack of understanding of the vulnerability of striatum in this debilitating brain disease. As a way to understand this, we study genes that get “turned on” only in the striatum, but nowhere else in the brain. We subsequently test these genes in a mouse model of HD to see if their ‘expression’ has changed . By knowing more about these newly described striatum-specific genes in this mouse model, we hope to open doors toward future therapies in HD.
We hope to see you there!
– Your Café Scientifique Vancouver Organizers