Summary

Senior Lecturer at the School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences. Previously Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at Aarhus University in Denmark, funded by the European Commission. Prior to that I was a Postdoc in the United States, at Georgetown University in Washington DC and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. 

Blood-brain barrier models

The treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders, including Alzheimer, Parkinson, and brain tumours, is hindered by the inability of drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which restricts brain exposure to less than 2 % out of the chemical drug space that spans ~10⁶⁰ molecules. CNS disorders are now an emerging public health problem, with Alzheimer's disease anticipated to affect 135 million by 2050. There are two major outstanding questions in the field of CNS drug delivery, namely (i) the unknown contributions of individual components of the BBB to the permeability of small molecules, and (ii) the unknown mechanism of change of the BBB integrity in disease and ageing. For (i), the glycocalyx is a component that is poorly understood but that plays a major role in CNS transport. For (ii), the BBB shows enhanced permeability in disease, which is ascribed to a number of mechanical factors, one of which is the thinning or uncrowding of the BBB. 

At Portsmouth, we develop all-atom computer simulation models of the healthy BBB endothelium, as well as novel in house permeability protocols. These include unguided molecular dynamics simulations, steered molecular dynamics, among others. 

Jorgensen Group Pure Profile