Hannah Saeger

Research Description

With the number of Americans age 65 and older increasing every year, the prevalence of AD and related dementias is expected to increase in parallel. Projections predict that by 2050 approximately 13.8 million Americans in this age group will be living with AD. There is a current lack in effective therapeutics to provide relief for this terminal illness, particularly the characteristic neuronal atrophy and associated neuropsychiatricsymptoms. Though the use of psychedelics in medicine is considered controversial, recent studies in our lab have shown that their plasticity-promoting effects can be uncoupled from their hallucinogenic effects. This highlights that these compounds can serve as molecular scaffolds for medicinal chemists to generate well-tolerated, non-hallucinogenic analogs that retain the beneficial plasticity-promoting effects. I believe that the therapeutic potential of these compounds for neuropsychiatric disorders make them well deserving of the research that will be necessary to generate efficacious non-hallucinogenic analogs and fully elucidate their mechanism of action.

As the main focus of my dissertation research, I am investigating the capability of psychedelics and their analogs to act as disease-modifying therapeutics for AD. The first aim of my project is to determine if psychedelics elicit neuroinflammation-reducing effects by acting on astrocytes or microglia. The second aim of my project is to evaluate the ability of psychedelics to prevent and reverse the atrophy of neurons caused by Aβ insults.