Engineering Newsletter

Sanat Kumar | Chemical Engineering

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. Today, as many as 5.3 million Americans have the disease, which is the nation’s sixth leading cause of death. It kills more than 72,000 Americans a year and costs the nation $148 billion annually. Unfortunately, while existing drugs can slow the worsening of symptoms, they cannot stop the loss of brain cells.

Chemical Engineering Professor Sanat Kumar and his team are working to come up with an alternative way to fight Alzheimer’s. They are trying to figure out why proteins in the brain form the sticky plaques that are the hallmark of the disease and how to prevent them. The best analogy may be to cooking an egg. With a pre-heated, well-oiled pan, the egg won’t stick to the skillet. “Can we learn something from frying an egg?” asks Kumar.

Currently, Kumar and his team are conducting research in vitro—in a test tube. The next step will be to work with colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to build a brain and simulate what happens to it when a patient has Alzheimer’s disease.

“You want to look where no one else is looking, and that’s how you make discoveries,” says Kumar. “It’s all curiosity.”

Kumar holds an ScD in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.