News

YEAR 15

October 2024: We use our cash prize from the Doris Duke Foundation Award to go on a lab retreat to New Orleans, where we update our lab handbook, eat great food, stay up way too late, and don't break any ankles. 

September 2024: Our team at Penn is awarded a program project grant to study mechanisms underlying different disease trajectories in the synucleinopathies. This is a big 5-year program with projects led by David Irwin, Virginia Lee, Kelvin Luk, and Alice. Alice's project focuses on assigning target genes to risk loci, linking biomarkers causally to clinical sequelae, and investigating the leads from these genetic and biomarker studies in iPSC-derived neurons and microglia. 

July 2024: George starts a faculty job as Assistant Professor of Neurology at Penn, with his primary appointment in the VA. Congratulations, George!!!

June 2024: Eliza publishes her paper on GPNMB biomarker levels in GBA+ and GBA- PD. 

May 2024: Tom and Alice publish their paper describing the Molecular Integration in Neurological Disease (MIND) Initiative. Altogether, we managed to recruit nearly 1700 PD patients into a research cohort, identifying 159 with GBA1 variants and 44 with LRRK2 variants. 

April 2024: Masen, Kathi, and Cooper join the lab! Wow wow! Also, we are now doing (a little) drug discovery!! Funded by SPARK-NS, we are trying to see if we can translate our discovery that cells need GPNMB to take up alpha-synuclein fibrils into a way to stop the progression of Parkinson's disease. Kurt Brunden and Kelvin Luk, who know a lot more about drug discovery than Alice, are on the team helping us. 

February 2024: Alice learns that the RO1 renewal she submitted was awarded as an NINDS Javits Award. 

YEAR 14

October 2023: Alice wins the Doris Duke Foundation Paragon Award. She promptly drops the crystal trophy on the ground in New York City. However, she is cheeky enough to request, and the foundation is prepared enough to provide, a replacement trophy. 

May 2023: Alice and Marc collaborate with Dan Weintraub to review the topic of why people with alpha-synucleinopathies vary so greatly in their clinical cognitive presentation. You can read their thoughts here. 

Jan 2023: Sambit joins the lab. Welcome, Sambit!

YEAR 13

August 2022: Two new papers from the lab: One from Maria and Yunji demonstrating that GPNMB is the target gene of a PD GWAS signal and that it is both necessary and sufficient for cells to take up alpha-synuclein fibrils, and one from Junchao screening for biomarkers predicting cognitive decline in PD. 

June 2022: Lab retreat to Puerto Rico! Lots of excitement (including one broken ankle 😱), which we survived, emerging with a draft lab handbook. 

Spring to June 2022: Marc joins the lab and almost immediately passes his prelim. Congratulations, Marc!! 

Jan 2022: Sromona joins the lab. Welcome, Sromona!!

YEAR 12

July 2021: Alice is promoted to full professor. She learns this when she turns her phone on after getting off a plane!

June 2021: Fei's paper demonstrating that TMEM106B genotypes associate with the degree of TDP-43 pathology in ALS brain and that TMEM106B knockdown increases TDP-43 aggregate formation in cells is published in Acta Neuropathologica. You can read the paper here. What is amazing is that Fei did this work as a one-year Visiting Scholar, with 9 months of that year during COVID19 lockdown. 

May 2021: Adama joins the lab. Welcome, Adama! Yunji wins the Neysa Cristol Adams Award for her research at her graduation. Congrats to Yunji!

YEAR 11

April 2021: Roseanne passes her prelim. Congratulations, Roseanne!

March 2021: A three-lab collaboration (with the labs of Kelvin Luk and Dejian Ren, whom Alice refers to as Master of the Lysosome) culminates in a Nature paper describing the cell biological, animal model, and human genetics dissection of TMEM175, a risk factor for PD. You can read the paper here and the Penn coverage here. Alice is hopeful that TMEM175 can be a new target for therapeutic development, which seems to be happening already. 

February 2021: Our first paper describing the MIND Initiative is published. You can read about our efforts to enroll and molecularly characterize our entire PD clinical population here. Spoiler alert: PD patients enthusiastically want to enroll and almost all of them want to know their own genetic status. Congrats to Tom, who led the paper, and Noah, whose reassuring presence is definitely a big factor in why MIND's enrollment rate is >95%!

October 2020: David and Tom's paper predicting which Lewy Body Disorder patients will have Alzheimer's Disease pathology at autopsy is published -- introducing the ADNC Risk Score, which you can read about here. Alzforum covered it here.

September 2020: Roseanne joins the lab. Welcome!

July 2020: Our lab puts three undergrads through "R Bootcamp" as part of the American Physician Scientists Association Virtual Summer Research Program (APSA VSRP). Welcome to Evan, Maurice, and Chibby!

YEAR 10

May 2020: Maria passes her Bioengineering dissertation proposal! Good job, Maria!

Also, Junchao and Alice help Alice's brother Royce Chen understand the impact of COVID19 on NYC resident physicians. You can read the paper here. 

May 10, 2020: Our 10 year Lab-iversary.  

We sadly realize that we cannot have a lab retreat in the middle of COVID and have a Zoom dinner instead. You can watch the nostalgic video here. Congratulations to the winner of Guess Whose Baby -- Defne Amado! (First runner-up Travis Unger also did a good job.)

For the nostalgic, here are the earlier years.