Anil Cashikar is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, USA. He received his PhD from the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India in the field of protein folding. He did his postdoctoral studies with the late Dr. Susan Lindquist at the University of Chicago and then at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, where he studied prion-like protein aggregation and the molecular chaperone specializing in protein disaggregation, Hsp104. He later conducted genetic screens using a yeast-based model for the aggregation and toxicity of a-synuclein to identify potential modulators of synuclein pathology in Parkinson’s disease. He also studied the role of a small heat shock protein class of molecular chaperones in the aggregation and toxicity of amyloid-beta peptide in vitro as well as in a mouse model of amyloid plaque deposition.

Dr. Cashikar jointly runs the lab with Dr. Steven Paul and mentors several postdocs at the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders at Washington University School of Medicine. Dr. Cashikar and colleagues recently identified cholesterol 25-hydroxylase (Ch25h) as a potential link between lipid metabolism and neuroinflammation, which is important in tau-mediated neurodegeneration. This leads to the hypothesis that inhibitors of Ch25h may comprise a novel class of therapeutic agents.