Illuminating and therapeutically modulating extracellular protein dynamics in the brain.

The Shuken Lab develops chemical and proteomic technologies to understand how extracellular proteins shape brain aging, neurodegeneration, and therapeutic access to the brain.

Many important brain proteins act outside cells, where they move between biological compartments, assemble into disease-associated structures, and are cleared through mechanisms that remain difficult to observe directly. These processes are central to aging and neurodegenerative disease, yet they are hard to study with conventional genetic or biochemical tools.

Our approach combines organic synthesis, mass spectrometry, chemical biology, and neurobiology to create new ways of measuring and perturbing extracellular protein behavior in vivo. The long-term goal is to reveal actionable biology and build strategies that help diagnose, prevent, or treat diseases of the aging brain.