Andrew Yoo, PhD, a professor of developmental biology at WashU Medicine, has received the 2024 Transformative Research Award, a two-year $1 million grant from the Hereditary Disease Foundation. Yoo and his collaborator, Osama Al Dalahmah, MD, PhD, of Columbia University, will use this support to pursue potential therapeutics for Huntington’s disease, an inherited neurodegenerative disorder that typically shows symptoms beginning in middle age. The condition has no effective treatments and is eventually fatal.
Yoo’s research is focused on the aging process and how it contributes to a decline in brain cell function, whether from Huntington’s disease or other neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. He has developed methods to transform skin cells from adult patients into neurons to model neurodegeneration at many life stages and to test potential therapeutics.
His team has implicated molecules called long noncoding RNAs in the progression of Huntington’s disease based on the work of Ji-Sun Kwon, a graduate student in the Computational & Systems Biology program. As part of this grant, Yoo and his colleagues will investigate two specific long noncoding RNA molecules as potential drug targets for Huntington’s disease.