Dr. Aditi Deshpande is currently a research scientist at Bioage Labs in California, USA. She is a cellular and molecular neurobiologist by training. She did her Ph.D. in Systemic Neurosciences at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. For her doctoral studies, she designed and successfully implemented a technique to identify presynaptic connections of adult-generated neurons in the mouse brain using a modified rabies virus. At the same time, she collaborated on a project involving reprogramming of postnatal mouse astrocytes to neurons in vitro. She gained comprehensive knowledge of neurogenesis and considerable expertise in handling neural stem cells, In-vitro and in vivo. It was during her PhD when she realized that perhaps the intricate nature of neuronal connections is probably why it has not, so far, been possible to develop viable cell-based therapies for brain repair. So, for her postdoctoral studies at University of California San Francisco, USA, she worked on generating neurons from skin cells in a dish to better understand their connectivity. She first generated induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) derived from individuals harboring a deletion or duplication at 16p11.2, a known autism susceptibility locus. She successfully identified cellular phenotypes in the patient-derived neurons that correlated with patient phenotypes. Furthermore, she identified a few targets and molecular pathways that could eventually be manipulated for therapeutic purposes. Dr. Deshpande has expertise in developing cellular and molecular tools to study neural pathways and function. She is using this skill set in a biotech setting to develop therapeutics to target aging-related diseases. Specifically, she is working on reducing neuroinflammation, one of the most common phenotypes in the aging brain. She is developing cell-based assays to understand the pathways involved so that they can be targeted for therapeutic intervention.
Neuro-Inflammation, Cell-Based Assay Development, Neurodegeneration, Aging, Neuro-Metabolomics, Drug Discovery and Development.