Dritan Agalliu
Columbia University, NY·Neuroscience
Blood vessels in the brain and eye are special: their walls form tight barriers, the blood-brain barrier and blood-retina barrier, that control what passes from blood into nerve tissue. How these vessels develop, and how disease or injury breaks the barrier, matters for eye disease, neurodegeneration and brain trauma.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biomedical Engineering
Biology
- Topics
blood-brain barrier
blood-retina barrier
angiogenesis
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2027
What they work on
- Test how glutamate levels regulate deep retinal vessel growth and blood-retina barrier integrity, using Vglut1 mutant mice (no glutamate release) and Gnat1 mutant mice (constant release), and how this interacts with acetylcholine-driven activity waves.
- Test whether Müller glia, retinal support cells, sense glutamate and respond by producing Norrin, a vessel growth signal, using mice that lack neuronal glutamate release or glial glutamate uptake.
- Determine whether activating Norrin/β-catenin signaling in vessel-lining endothelial cells rescues the vessel and barrier defects seen in Vglut1 mutant mice.
- Generate and validate mature human brain endothelial cells, pericytes and astrocytes from induced pluripotent stem cells, refining protocols with microRNAs and barrier-specific transcription factors.
- Build perfused 3D blood-brain barrier models in brain-on-a-chip devices and vascularized brain organoids, and characterize barrier function with transcriptomics, imaging and transport tests.
- Measure how plasma and immune cells from traumatic brain injury patients alter barrier biology, drug and protein transport, pericyte and astrocyte behavior, and macrophage and T cell crossing in the model.
More about the research
The lab's two projects approach this from different sides: one asks how nerve cell activity guides vessel growth and barrier formation in the developing mouse retina, and the other builds a human lab model to study how blood and immune cells damage the barrier after traumatic brain injury.
Why it matters
Understanding how neuron activity builds retinal vessels may help explain how glutamate toxicity harms blood vessels in retinal diseases linked to neurodegeneration and could guide new treatments for them. The human blood-brain barrier model could help researchers find biomarkers for traumatic brain injury, a leading cause of death and disability, and test drugs that target the inflammation driven by the body's immune response after injury.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ethan Lippmann
Vanderbilt University, TN·Biomedical Engineering
Measure how dose affects gene and protein silencing by siRNA-EG18, an siRNA linked to an albumin-binding fatty acid carrier, in brain myeloid cells after injection into cerebrospinal fluid, targeting the Alzheimer's risk gene Cd33.
Maribel Vazquez
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Biomedical Engineering
Examine how combined endothelial cell and Müller glia responses change cell growth, shape, tight junction protein expression, and barrier resistance and permeability in co-cultures that mimic the inner blood-retinal barrier.
John Finan
University of Illinois Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Produce isogenic human induced pluripotent stem cell lines with and without the Piezo1 E756del variant, which keeps this stretch-activated calcium channel open longer.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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