Albert Wu ’24 is a concentrator in Biomedical Engineering originally from Weston, Massachusetts. Albert hopes to attend medical school after graduation, with aspirations of participating in leading-edge biomedical innovation while also providing compassionate patient care as a physician-engineer. He has been a research assistant at Professor Qian Chen’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Translational Nanomedicine since he was a freshman, completing an UTRA in the spring of his sophomore year. Outside of academics, Albert volunteers at Hope Hospice and Hasbro Children’s Hospital and is an executive board member for the Brown Undergraduate Students for Hospice Volunteering (BUSH). He also helps organize Brown/RISD STEAM and the Brown Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers (SASE). Finally, Albert has been a competitive foil fencer for over 9 years and is a member of the Brown fencing team.

Project:

Nanopieces are a drug vehicle that was originally designed for delivering nucleic acids through cartilage, which is usually difficult to penetrate. Recent research suggests that they may also be capable of delivering cargo across the blood-brain barrier. Antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs) are potent neurological drugs for alleviating neurodegenerative disease at the post-transcriptional level but cannot pass the blood-brain barrier and are usually administered through invasive injection into the spinal cord. This project will investigate whether intravenous (IV) injection of ASOs and Nanopieces can deliver functional ASOs to the brain of mice. In tandem, I will connect abstract science to its real-world significance by interviewing community members who are suffering from neurodegenerative diseases. This will culminate in a narrative audio journal for subjects and their families.