Welcome to the Chua Lab at JHU
Neuronal health is reliant on autophagy, a highly conserved form of cellular housekeeping. Our lab focuses on how and why derangements in autophagy -- from aging to genetic mutations -- lead to multiple forms of neurological disease. These are devastating disorders for which there is a growing and urgent need to establish safe and effective curative treatments. To accelerate the development of new therapies, manipulate autophagy with genetic precision, and resolve autophagy derangements in deep ultrastructural detail, we have developed novel and powerful experimental platforms and pipelines using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), iPSC-derived neurons (iNeurons), CRISPR engineering, and super resolution microscopy.
Team