Neurological & Psychiatric Disease
Sulzer and his lab extended their work on basal ganglia synapses to understanding the molecular events that control neurotransmission as well as the neuronal effects that underlie Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases, schizophrenia, drug addiction, and autism. They helped to introduce the now widespread notion that problems in protein and organelle degradation, particularly via autophagy by lysosomes was disturbed in neuronal disease, with early papers showing that this was implicated in the formation of neuromelanin, the pigment of the substantia nigra, in methamphetamine neurotoxicity, and Huntington's disease. With Ana Maria Cuervo of Albert Einstein College of Medicine they showed that a cause of Parkinson's disease could be due to an interference with a chaperone-mediated autophagy caused by the protein alpha-synuclein.
The Sulzer lab has published over 120 papers on this research. For his work, Sulzer has received awards from the McKnight Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and NARSAD. He runs the Basic Neuroscience NIH / NIDA T32 training program for postdoctoral research in basic neuroscience at Columbia. He received a Ph.D. in Biology from Columbia University in 1988.
Read more about this topic: David Sulzer
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