Cure Alzheimer's Fund Cure Alzheimer's Fund

Li Gan, Ph.D.

Director, Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer’s Disease Research Institute, Weill Cornell Medicine; Burton P. and Judith B. Resnick Distinguished Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Dr. Li Gan is director of the Helen and Robert Appel Alzheimer’s Disease Research Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine, where she is also the Burton P. and Judith B. Resnick Distinguished Professor in Neurodegenerative Diseases.

Dr. Gan received a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology from Peking University, in Beijing, and a doctorate in cellular and molecular physiology from Yale University School of Medicine. She completed postdoctoral training at Harvard Medical School and at the Gladstone Institute of Neurological Disease at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she rose through the ranks to become a senior investigator at Gladstone and professor-in-residence at UCSF. She joined Weill Cornell Medicine in July 2018.

Dr. Gan’s research focuses on innate immunity and proteostasis–the converging and interconnected pathways in such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. Her lab discovered that acetylation of tau is a new posttranslational mechanism underlying pathogenic tau accumulation, discovered toxic microglial mechanisms in neurodegeneration, and developed scalable neural iPSC-derived models that are widely used in the scientific community.

 

Related Research:

Microglial–Astrocytic Mechanisms of APOE3 Christchurch–Mediated Resilience to Tauopathy Li Gan Sarah Naguib 2025-11-03 Sex-Biased Toll-Like Receptor 7 (TLR7) Signaling in Demyelination and Its Inhibition by Small Molecules Li Gan Subhash Sinha 2024-11-23 Development of Human cGAS Inhibitors to treat Alzheimer’s Disease Li Gan Subhash Sinha 2022-02-11

Funded Research

These projects were made possible from Cure Alzheimer's Fund support.

Project Description Researchers Funding
Microglial–Astrocytic Mechanisms of APOE3 Christchurch–Mediated Resilience to Tauopathy 2025

$80,500
Sex-Biased Toll-Like Receptor 7 (TLR7) Signaling in Demyelination and Its Inhibition by Small Molecules 2024

$402,500

Development of Human cGAS Inhibitors to treat Alzheimer’s Disease 2021-2023

$750,000

Selected Publications

These published papers resulted from Cure Alzheimer’s Fund support.

Alarcón-Espósito, J., Nagiri, R. K., Wang, S., Larson, C., Carvallo-Torres, L., Singh, V. K., Glickman, J. F., Gan, L., & Sinha, S. C. High-Throughput Screening and Initial SAR Studies Identify a Novel Submicromolar Potent Human cGAS Inhibitor, ACS Chemical Bbiology, November 17, 2025, Read More

Naguib, S., Lopez-Lee, C., Torres, E. R., Lee, S. I., Zhu, J., Zhu, D., Ye, P., Norman, K., Zhao, M., Wong, M. Y., Ambaw, Y. A., Muñoz-Castañeda, R., Wang, W., Patel, T., Bhagwat, M., Norinsky, R., Mok, S. A., Walther, T. C., Farese, R. V., Jr, Luo, W., Sinha, S. C., … Gan, L. The R136S mutation in the APOE3 gene confers resilience against tau pathology via inhibition of the cGAS-STING-IFN pathway, Immunity, June 18, 2025, Read More

Wang, S., Qi, C., Rajpurohit, C., Ghosh, B., Xiong, W., Wang, B., Qi, Y., Hwang, S. H., Hammock, B. D., Li, H., Gan, L., & Zheng, H. Inhibition of soluble epoxide hydrolase confers neuroprotection and restores microglial homeostasis in a tauopathy mouse model, Molecular Neurodegeneration, April 23, 2025, Read More

Alarcón-Espósito, J., Nagiri, R. K., Gan, L., & Sinha, S. C. Identification and development of cGAS inhibitors and their uses to treat Alzheimer’s disease, NeuroTherapeutics, January 31, 2025, Read More

Lopez-Lee, C., Kodama, L., Fan, L., Zhu, D., Zhu, J., Wong, M. Y., Ye, P., Norman, K., Foxe, N. R., Ijaz, L., Yu, F., Chen, H., Carling, G. K., Torres, E. R., Kim, R. D., Dubal, D. B., Liddelow, S. A., Sinha, S. C., Luo, W., & Gan, L. Tlr7 drives sex differences in age- and Alzheimer’s disease-related demyelination, Science, November 29, 2024, Read More

Carling, G. K., Fan, L., Foxe, N. R., Norman, K., Wong, M. Y., Zhu, D., Corona, C., Razzoli, A., Yu, F., Yarahmady, A., Ye, P., Chen, H., Huang, Y., Amin, S., Sereda, R., Lopez-Lee, C., Zacharioudakis, E., Chen, X., Xu, J., Cheng, F., … Gan, L. Alzheimer’s disease-linked risk alleles elevate microglial cGAS-associated senescence and neurodegeneration in a tauopathy model, Neuron, September 24, 2024, Read More

Huang, Y., Liu, B., Sinha, S. C., Amin, S., & Gan, L. Mechanism and therapeutic potential of targeting cGAS-STING signaling in neurological disorders, Molecular Neurodegeneration, November 8, 2023, Read More

Udeochu, J. C., Amin, S., … Tsai, L. H., Subhash, S. C., & Gan, L. Tau activation of microglial cGAS–IFN reduces MEF2C-mediated cognitive resilience, Nature Neuroscience, April 24, 2023, Read More

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