Dey Lab News

RNA Institute Scientist Bijan K. Dey and his lab team are using a new NIH grant to look the role at epitranscriptomics in skeletal muscle stem cell biology so to find a therapeutic platform to combat childhood muscle degenerative disease.

Dr. Bijan Dey will be editing a special issue of the journal Life on "Non-coding RNAs in Cellular Differentiation, Development and Diseases". Submit your manuscript by December 31, 2021.

Academic Minute - On University at Albany Week: Early detection is critical for combating Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Bijan Dey, principal investigator at the RNA Institute, looks into better testing methods.

The devastating effects of Duchene muscular dystrophy (DMD) can be mitigated if detection takes place in early childhood.

A tremendous potential for biomedical applications, including targeted delivery of drugs, exists through DNA nanostructures, but one key challenge has been the limited stability of these structures in the body’s tissues and blood. Now, a University team of researchers led by Arun Richard Chandrasekaran and Ken Halvorsen of the RNA Institute has circumvented that problem by discovering a potential direct route to biostability: an already existing biostable DNA motif capable of use in the design of new drug carriers and diagnostics. The team, also consisting of Biological Sciences faculty Bijan Dey, Siu Wah Wong-Deyrup and Paromita Dey, and undergraduate researcher Javier Vilcapoma, made two breakthroughs, the first being that the PX DNA has remarkable nuclease resistance and biostability and the second being that the biostability is correlated to the number of crossover points.

Two RNA Institute scientists produce a nanotechnology approach that detects disease biomarkers at lower cost.

Dey, a faculty researcher at The RNA Institute at the University at Albany, was recently awarded the American Heart Association’s (AHA) prestigious Scientist Development Grant to gain a better understanding of DMD and develop RNA-based therapy treatments that can potentially fight the disease.

The American Heart Association (AHA) has awarded its distinguished Scientist Development Grant to a University at Albany researcher for the development of new therapies to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). Bijan K. Dey, PhD, is a faculty researcher at the university’s RNA Institute and is working on a class of small non-coding RNA molecules called microRNAs. His lab is studying how microRNAs maintain normal muscle function and what goes wrong when children are diagnosed with Duchenne MD and associated heart conditions.