Priyanka Saminathan, Ph.D.

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Saminathan is an early-career postdoctoral fellow at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, San Diego, California, under the guidance of Dr. Sonia Sharma. She earned her Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, New York.

Sharp Minds March 4, 2024 Lecture Topic

Why Are Women More Likely to Develop Alzheimer’s Disease?

Every year the number of Alzheimer’s disease cases steadily increases, and older women are twice as likely to develop the disease during their lifetime. Non-invasive methods for diagnosing early Alzheimer’s disease do not exist, and treatments are few. Dr. Sonia Sharma’s lab at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI) specializes in applying state-of-the-art profiling methods to measure thousands of small molecule metabolites in the blood of patients with inflammatory diseases like Alzheimer's disease. Her lab's researchers are working on identifying so-called “protective metabolites” in the blood of men and women without Alzheimer's Disease compared to those with Alzheimer's Disease. Join Priyanka Saminathan, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Sharma’s lab at LJI as she shares her research on how both sex and age play a vital role in driving Alzheimer’s disease and discusses the impact her research could have on the development of new bio-markers and therapeutics for women and men with Alzheimer’s disease.