Research Projects

Given an overwhelming increase of dementia costs and an aging population, there is an urgent need for finding novel therapies for Alzheimer Disease (AD). We are, however, facing a large number of failed clinical trials and a retraction of the nervous system R&D programmes from several big pharmaceutical companies. Increased collaboration between...

The goal of the TASPPI European Training Network (ETN) is the establishment of a highly interdisciplinary research and educational training platform for early stage scientists in the Chemical Life Sciences to overcome the inherent boundaries between academia and industry and to increase their employability in both areas. To this end we have teamed...

Recent Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on circadian clock (CC) have laid the foundation for ground-breaking approaches to treat many diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is a current public health priority. Amplifying the demographic burden of the rising numbers of patients is the low success rate of AD therapies. Given that CC genes...

Memory for unique personal experiences (episodic memory) is critical to daily life functioning. This form of long-term memory also displays the largest degree of age-related decline. This condition is accelerated in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which is often the precursor for emerging Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Since AD produces...

With the NeutrAD ERC PoC project, we present the first disease-modifying Alzheimers Disease (AD) drugs that abrogate leukocyte-mediated neurotoxicity and represent a novel class of drugs in the treatment of AD.AD is a neurological disorder characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive function and leads to death within 3-9 years after...

Many elderly people suffer from one or another Mild Cognitive Impairment (PwMCI). Among many is forgetfulness which may or may not progress to dementia. They are faced with doubt, worry and diminishing self-worth while often being afraid to look for help. We will develop RESILIEN-T to act as a coach to improve the PwMCI self-management in different...

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in available information. This has created an urgent need for fast statistical and machine learning methods that can scale up to big data sets. Standard approaches, including the now routinely used Bayesian methods, are becoming computationally infeasible, especially in complex models with many parameters and...

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia affecting more than 35 million people worldwide and its prevalence is projected to nearly double every 20 years with tremendous social and economical impact on the society. There is no cure for Alzheimer's disease and current drugs only temporarily improve disease symptoms. Alzheimer's...

The aim of this Project is to create an International and Intersectoral network to facilitate the exchange of staff to progress developments in reminding technologies for persons with dementia which can be deployed in smart environments. The focus will be on developing staff and partner skills in the areas of user centered design and behavioral...

TREM2MEDS emerges from the ERC PoC 2022 project TREM2ENGINES (Grant agreement ID: 101069395), which validated the efficacy of a novel treatment for Alzheimers Disease (AD) and Nasu-Hakola Disease (NHD) in murine models. A relevant proportion of AD cases and all forms of NHD are caused by pathogenic mutations in the TREM2 gene, which lead to...

Current knowledge of neurodegenerative diseases is limited by poor understanding of how they progress through the central nervous system (CNS). It has recently been hypothesized that clinical progression in these conditions involves the systematic spreading of protein misfolding along neuronal pathways. Protein aggregates would trigger misfolding...

There are an increasing number of people across Europe with debilitating speech pathologies (e.g., due to stroke, Parkinson's, etc). These groups face communication problems that can lead to social exclusion. They are now being further marginalised by a new wave of speech technology that is increasingly woven into everyday life but which is not...