Research Overview
The Watts Lab studies the pathobiology of neurodegenerative diseases of aging, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In these diseases, misfolding and subsequent aggregation of proteins or peptides into β-sheet-enriched forms initiates a cascade of events that ultimately leads to neurological dysfunction and death of neurons or glial cells in the brain.
There currently do not exist therapies capable of halting or even slowing the progression of any of these diseases. Thus, understanding the earliest disease-associated events (i.e. the initial formation of misfolded proteins) may be paramount to developing an effective treatment. The Watts lab uses a combination of animal and cellular models in order to investigate the molecular mechanisms of protein aggregation and neuronal dysfunction that occur during disease.
The Watts lab is part of the Tanz Centre for Research in Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Toronto in Canada.
The Joel Watts Lab 