Dr Johnny HABCHI

Interests

My research is focused on understanding the molecular principles underlying protein aggregation in neurodegenerative disorders. In particular, I am studying the molecular pathways through which the amyloid-beta peptide (Ab) aggregate and form deposits in the brain of Alzheimer's disease patients. I have been mainly focused in the past four years on developing a drug discovery strategy that aim at identifying small molecules that could interfere with the aggregation pathway of Ab and more importantly at understanding how to target specific microscopic steps in Ab aggregation with these small molecules using a combination of experimental and theoretical tools. The drug discovery strategy provided a powerful pipeline for drug discovery to develop systematically small molecules against AD.

Worms treated with a small molecule
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Research Focus

Equipment

Chemical kinetics, circular dichroism, fluorescence spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering, molecular biology, isothermal titration calorimetry, size exclusion chromatography

Immunohistochemistry

Microscopy

Protein purification

Recombinant protein expression