NE 430

Credit: 3 hours.

This course will expose students to engineered technologies and strategies currently used to control the behavior of cells in the nervous system, with a special emphasis placed on their applications in regenerative medicine and gene therapy. This course will first introduce students to the pathogenic mechanisms underlying many neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases, with a focus toward identifying potential opportunities for therapeutic intervention. With this foundation in place, students will then be introduced to contemporary strategies for directing the differentiation of pluripotent stem cells to neural cells and tissues, with an emphasis on the role that biomaterials can play in the process. Applications of neural tissue engineering for disease modeling and drug discovery will also be discussed. The course will then introduce students to the genetic technologies that can be used to modulate and dissect the activity of cells in the nervous system, discussing in-depth the potential for these technologies to treat neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders by gene therapy.

3 undergraduate hours. No graduate credit. Prerequisite: NE 330 or instructor consent.