NIH grant to fund study of neurodegenerative diseases using electrical engineering principles

Binghamton University Assistant Professor Jungwook “Jay” Paek is an electrical engineer — so how did he end up researching the human brain?

He wants to determine how electrical engineering principles can be applied to study neurological ailments such as Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia that are thought to be caused by the buildup of unwanted proteins in brain cells.

Paek and collaborator Myungwoon Lee, an assistant professor of chemistry at Drexel University, recently received a $414,191 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the interaction of Lewy bodies – alpha-synuclein-rich protein aggregates – with the brain’s diverse cellular environments relates to the development of neurodegenerative diseases.

After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in his native Korea, Paek worked as a senior engineer for Samsung specializing in LCD light analysis and polymer microfabrication.

He first became interested in organic technology while studying for his PhD at Iowa State University, where he designed and fabricated bio-inspired microsystems (also known as soft robotics). As a postdoctoral research associate with Professor Dan Huh at the University of Pennsylvania, he worked on in vitro modeling of human tissues and organs.

“I became curious how I could apply these electric engineering principles for studying human physiology and pathophysiology,” said Paek, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Our bodies are highly dynamic both mechanically and electrically, and disruptions in these biophysical cues can affect disease processes across diverse organs.”

For this latest NIH research, Paek and his PhD student, Anika Alim, will develop brain-on-a-chip technology with neurons and blood vessels inside a microengineered device. Using these chips, they can observe how neurodegenerative diseases compromise neuronal function, impairing the normal firing of electrical impulses.

“Animal models can help us to understand the complex pathophysiology of the human body, but there are concerns about the interspecies variations between animal and human physiology,” Paek said. “Animal models also come with high costs, long-term requirements, variations among individual animals and ethical issues.”

The buildup of Lewy bodies and other proteins in the brain can affect thinking, memory and movement. They are considered factors in dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders.

“We are interested in how Lewy bodies can propagate over other brain regions and what factors affect their propagation,” Paek said. “Blood vessels, neurons and maybe other cell types in the human brain might affect the progression of Parkinson’s.”