Department of Internal Medicine, University of Central Florida, Orlando, United StatesAlzheimer’s disease; Treatment advancements; Cholinesterase inhibitors; Anti-amyloid immunotherapies; FDA-approved medications; Cognitive decline; Memory loss; Neurology; Dementia care; Brain health; Neurodegeneration
Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, The University of Arizona, Tucson, United StatesMachine learning; Optimization; Signal processing; Bioinformatics
Dr. Saurav Mallik is currently working as Research Scientist in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, The University of Arizona, USA. Previously, he worked as Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, USA for more than three years (2019-2022), the Center of Precision Health, Department of School of Biomedical Informatics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, Texas, USA for one and half year (2018-2019), and in the Division of Bio-statistics, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida, USA for more than one year (2017-2018). He obtained his PhD degree in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering (C.S.E.) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India in 2017 while his PhD works carried out in Machine Intelligence Unit (MIU), Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, India. He worked previously at ISI, Kolkata, India as a Junior Research Fellow (JRF) in DST (Department of Science & Technology, New Delhi, Govt. of India)-sponsored Swarnajayanti project and as a Visiting Scientist (VS) for a total of more than 3 years (2011-2013 & 2015-2016). He also worked in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India as UGC (University Grant Commission, Govt. of India) Research Fellow for 2 years (2014-2015 & 2016-2017). He is the recipient of Research Associate-ship (RA) from CSIR (Council of Scientific and Industrial Research), MHRD, Govt. of India in 2017. He also worked as assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in Mallabhum Institute of Technology, Bisnupur, WB, India (currently on leave). He is also recipient of "Emerging Researcher In Bioinformatics" award from Bioclues & BIRD Award steering committee, India (http://bioclues.org/) in the year 2020 and "Young scientist award" on “International Scientist Awards on Engineering, Science and Medicine" (ISAO 2021) from a non-profit organization, VDGOOD Professional Association of Scientists, Engineers and Doctors, India in the year 2021. He received two times Travel Grant Award for International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM), June 2018 at Los Angeles, California, USA and August 2021 at Philadelphia, PA, USA. Dr. Mallik has coauthored more than 180 research papers in various peer-reviewed International Journals, Conferences and Book Chapters. He also has more than 20 authored/edited book publication in Taylor & Francis, River publishers, IET, Springer, Bentham, etc. His papers are highly cited (google scholar citation >1850 and h-index=22). He attended many national and international conferences in USA and India. He is currently an active member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), USA and life member of BIOCLUES, India (http://bioclues.org/). He is also member of international advisory committee of many reputed engineering colleges in India. His research areas include Data mining, computational biology, bioinformatics, Bio-statistics and machine learning.
Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the predominant form of dementia, presents various escalating world-wide challenges. The etiology of AD is basically intricate as well as diverse stemming from a mixture of different factors viz., aging, genetics, and epigenetics. The recent understanding of AD pathologies involves different hypotheses, viz., cholinergic, amyloid, tau protein, oxidative stress, glutamate excitotoxicity, microbiota-gut-brain axis, and many more. Unraveling the interplay among those pathological factors and targeting the preliminary initiators of AD need further elucidation as well as additional validation. In the past decades, most of the clinical drugs had been discontinued due to either their limited effectiveness or adverse side effects or both. Currently, the available related drugs basically offer symptomatic relief while those are accompanied through undesirable side effects.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved various treatments which can improve memory, thinking, and other cognitive symptoms on a temporary basis, while others target on slowing down the cognitive decline. A neurologist will consider the disease’s actual stage and the patient’s overall health condition to estimate the most effective and best treatment. Doctors might also prescribe antipsychotic medications to help manage agitation or other mood-related symptoms. However, these are typically used as a last resort due to their potential risks, including increased mortality in elderly patients with dementia-related psychosis.
This special issue basically covers the emerging computational approaches as well as pathological and therapeutic studies for the treatment of AD.
Here are some of the potential themes for this issue:
- Therapeutic approaches (anti-amyloid immunotherapies) to AD,
- Medication/drug prescription (FDA-approved medications) for the treatment,
- Cognitive decline,
- AD pathogenesis,
- Advances in AD diagnostic biomarkers,
- AD drug development,
- Clinical trials of AD,
- Discovery of various specific inhibitors and modulators (viz., dual-target inhibitors, cholinesterase inhibitors, allosteric modulators, covalent inhibitors, proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs)).
- Finding protein-protein interaction (PPI) modulators,
- Molecular docking for AD.
- Computational approaches on AD detection for RNAseq data.
- Computational approaches on AD detection for brain imaging data.