Valerie Daggett is a professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her laboratory is using computational and experimental methods to design diagnostic and therapeutic agents that target disorders characterized by an accumulation of toxic amyloid structures. After determining that these aggregates are comprised of amyloid proteins that fold into alpha sheets, her group designed peptides that bind to this unusual structure and inhibit additional aggregation in 14 different mammalian and bacterial amyloid systems. These alpha-sheet peptides have been used to develop assays for detecting toxic oligomers in cerebrospinal fluid and plasma, and have shown encouraging results in blood samples from people with Alzheimer’s disease. The assay has also been effective at detecting toxic aggregates of alpha-synuclein in a small number of samples from people with Parkinson’s disease. Dr. Daggett is an elected fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and the Biophysical Society.