The overarching goal of my current work is to aid in improving therapeutic approaches to cognitive disorders with the ultimate aim of enhancing human clinical trial efficacy.
While preclinical models have provided a background for understanding the mechanisms underlying disease pathogenesis, clinical trials are essential because the predictive utility of animal studies for therapeutic strategies in humans remains controversial; this stems, in part, from the fact that each model organism has its own strengths and weaknesses.
One focus of my current work is to develop an improved experimental framework for studying cognitive and behavioural symptoms of autism spectrum disorders and related disorders.
This experimental framework takes advantage of the unique anatomical, physiological and behavioural characteristics afforded by using rats as a model organism to answer questions that were previously intractable in disease models based in other species.