Gerald Grant Lab

Our lab focuses on understanding the role of the vasculature in the brain and brain tumors and ways to manipulate the blood-brain and blood-tumor barriers to enhance drug delivery to brain tumors in children. Although we employ a multitude of both in vitro and in vivo techniques to study these barriers, we focus on in vivo multi-photon microscopy imaging which provides cellular resolution to study these changes in a temporal and quantitative fashion. One of the main mechanisms we have to manipulate the blood-brain barrier is siRNA to claudin-5. Claudin-5 is an endothelial tight junction protein that highly expressed in the brain vasculature and using the siRNA to claudin-5 we can open the barrier in a reversible manner that allows enhanced drug delivery to the brain while not increasing side effects throughout the rest of the body.