CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas —
A professor Dr. Haeyoung Kim at Texas A&M Kingsville received an over half a million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health. That those funds will be used to look at ways the brain repairs itself to avoid age-related diseases like Alzheimer's, dementia and Parkinson's disease.
"Everyone gets a lot of DNA damage every day. Even in this moment, your brain, my brain gets DNA damage from external factors," Kim said
Kim said an excessive loss of those neurons can lead to loss in cognitive function and can even be connected to Alzheimer's. He has been studying cognitive aging for nearly 30 years now because to him this research means more.
Now that he has those funds, Kim says that money will go towards looking for the answers to something that hasn't only affected his family but also millions of others around the country.
"My grandmother and my father passed away with Alzheimer's stages, so I have a personal motivation and a scientific interest," Kim said.
With that grant money, Kim will also be able to hire more student researchers like sophomore Rigo Rosales who also shares the same passion for age-related disease research.
"He wrote me an email saying that he had got the NIH grant and that he would like for me to be a student worker for him so that was really exciting for me," Rosales said.
Rosales' grandfather suffers from dementia and says this research is very personal to him.
"Humans have eradicated so many diseases, but there's only two diseases that we really can't do anything about and that's dementia and cancer. Hopefully one day this research can help find a cure," he said.
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