By Katarina A. Lewczyk | Date Published: June 17, 2024

Neal Silverman Receives R21 Funding to Study Frontotemporal Dementia 

Neal Silverman, PhD, research director and professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Immunology, and faculty in the Program in Innate Immunity, and Fen-Biao Gao, PhD, of Neurology and RNA Therapeutics, received R21 funding for their project, “Mechanistic Investigation of Innate Immunity in a Drosophila Model of Frontotemporal Dementia.”

In the project, Drs. Silverman and Gao will use a drosophila (fruit fly) model of ALS to investigate the role of antimicrobial peptides in disease progression and begin to translate these findings into humans using iPSC-derived neuronal models.