Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, has been working in the field of neurobiology for almost 20 years. He has tried to understand the role of immune and injury responses in normal aging and degenerative diseases of the central nervous system using cellular and pre-clinical models of disease. His lab is focusing on understanding how different types of immune responses and activation of inflammatory pathways in the brain may be able to promote or ameliorate neurodegeneration as a result of aging or traumatic injury. Dr. Wyss-Coray and his team are using various neuropathological methods to quantify degeneration and have invested significant efforts in establishing state of the art behavioral tests for models. Over the past few years his lab has been particularly intrigued by the observation that brain aging and neurodegeneration are associated with cellular and molecular changes in the systemic environment and has shown that blood-derived factors are sufficient to modulate brain physiology at the molecular, cellular and functional levels. Dr. Wyss-Coray has put increasing effort into focused proteomic approaches in which he measures currently several hundred secreted signaling proteins he believes are critical regulators (and indicators) of physiological and pathophysiological processes throughout the body including the brain.