Affiliation:
1. Harvard Medical School, Drug Discovery Laboratory, MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease, Massachusetts General Hospital, Building 114-3300, 16th Street, Charlestown, MA 02129-4404, USA.
Abstract
Aleksey Kazantsev is Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusett General Hospital in Boston, MA, USA, and a Visiting Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin, Germany. He is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and an associate member of the European Huntington’s Disease Network. Over the past 12 years, Professor Kazantsev has devoted his time to discovering effective therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. His most important work in this area has been the discovery and development of small-molecule inhibitors of polyglutamate aggregation, which has now progressed to intensive preclinical development. More recently, his work has led to the identification of a novel molecular drug target, the microtubule deacetylase sirtuin 2 (SIRT2). Under his leadership, collaborative groups have discovered potent selective SIRT2 inhibitors that have been demonstrated to have beneficial effects in both Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease. Professor Kazantsev’s current research is focused on elucidating the neuronal function(s) of sirtuin proteins, with a specific focus on the role of SIRT2 in the regulation of cholesterol biosynthesis.