Krittika Ralhan, a research student from Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar who has been working on Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is selected for Fullbright-Nehru Fellowship for the year 2017-18.
Krittika Ralhan is a Ph.D. scholar in Biological Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar. She revealed that the scholarship would be used to conduct a part of her doctoral research work in a New York-based university, University of Rochester.
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Krittika Ralhan bagged the scholarship in the neuroscience subcategory. Explaining about her research work on Alzheimer's Disease, Krittika said that AD is primarily caused due to the aggregation of particular brain proteins that are related to ageing. Later, these proteins lose their function leading to loss of memory, linguistic skills and cognition.
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Currently, Ralhan is working on developing a cure for Alzheimer ’s disease and designing inhibitors that will target the aggregation of these proteins.
Speaking about the impacts of Alzheimer’s disease, Ralhan mentioned that it affects around 10 million people across the globe and the people are who are mostly affected are above 65 years of age. Currently, there is no proper curative treatment for this disease.
Ralhan confirmed that she would leave for University of Rochester in September 2018 and join Dr. Rudi Fasans’s Lab at the varsity. The lab has been playing a major role in designing macrocyclic peptides.
It is a great achievement for the country as well as Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, as one of the students from our country is working on developing a cure for an indigenous disease like Alzheimer.