Wanlu Du

As a neurobiologist and cancer biologist, my research is focused on studying the molecular mechanism of cell death and developing novel therapeutic strategies for those cell-death-associated human diseases such as brain tumor, cerebral ischemia, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). Basically, we want to prevent or rescue the good cells (i.e., neurons) from cell death, while induce selective cell death in the bad cells (i.e, tumor cells). Our ongoing projects include: (1) we study the mechanism of neuronal cell death with the specific goal of developing treatments for brain disorders (i.e., cerebral ischemia, AD and PD); (2) we study the mechanism of cancer cell death with the specific goal of developing new therapies to overcome cancer drug resistance and achieve better therapeutic efficacy for advanced cancers, esp. melanoma; (3) we study cancer-nervous system interactions with the goal of improving outcomes of many difficult-to-treat malignancies like brain metastases.