Question: Hi. When you grow cells in a dish to make them mimic the condition of brain diseases, does this make it easier for other scientists to prevent it infecting other people or to help people cure the disease?

Dawn Lau answered on 14 Jun 2016:

That’s a great question! The short answer is yes. When we mimic the condition of brain diseases in cells, what we’re really doing is to manipulate the cells using molecular biology techniques. This experimental manipulation is a really useful tool to scientists because they now have a cellular model of disease. The cellular model can be used for testing drugs, or we can use them to figure out the molecules that might be causing disease. By understanding more about the molecules that cause disease, we can design drugs to “correct” these molecules and hopefully lead to a therapeutic drug for patients, or even find a way to prevent the disease from happening in the first place.