Research Projects

Background: There has been great interest in identifying persons at high risk of developing Alzheimer disease (AD) and dementia, as they should constitute a target group for possible prevention or early treatment of dementia in the future. Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a transitional zone between normal cognitive function and clinical AD. The...

Your brain is among the most complex existing systems, and it processes every second an amazing amount of data. The most amazing thing, however, is that you get to know some of it. Declarative knowledge, meaning the portion of knowledge that we can consciously access and manipulate, is one of the most enduring mysteries of the human mind. How did...

The goal of the proposal is to identify the association of different narrative perseverations features in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subtypes with their neural oscillatory profiles. MCI patients show moderately impaired performance on neuropsychological tests but relatively intact global cognition and daily functioning. Validated as different...

Depressed mood, agitation, false beliefs, lack of motivation and other alterations in behaviour, usually named with the umbrella term of neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS), are commonly observed in people with Alzheimers disease (AD). NPS are highly prevalent in people with AD (35-85%) and increase the risk of dementia by up to 10 times. The onset of...

Imaging of distribution of drugs in mice delivers accurate information for confirmation that the mechanism of action elaborated in cell-based assays is also operative in vivo. These data are critical for the transfer of drug discovery process from pre-clinical to clinical phase. To enable the imaging, drugs should be labeled with easily detectable...

Bio2Brain aims to create a trans-European network of industrially oriented specialists fully trained and experienced, a significant driving force in innovating novel technologies to deliver biopharmaceuticals safely and via the nasal route of administration to the central nervous system (CNS). Diseases of the CNS and the spinal cord affect around...

Neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal dementias and prion diseases affect ~50 million people worldwide. Alzheimer’s disease, the most prevalent form, affects ~6% of the population over 65 years of age and is one of the leading causes of death in the elderly. All these diseases have...

The increasing number of elderly people will have a major impact on the prevalence of age-related diseases, which will pose major challenges to keep health systems in Europe sustainable. Current knowledge is insufficient to identify the transition of normal brain ageing into Alzheimer`s Disease (AD)-like brain damage. Elucidation of the genes and...

CombiDiag DN aims to develop an AI-data-driven peripheral biomarker based combinatorial diagnostic protocol for early stages of Alzheimers disease (AD), a major form of dementia, and to train a new generation of fellows for this interdisciplinary field. Dementia, a devastating disease of older age, is the challenge of our lifetime and one of the...

The objective of the PETAL Project is to provide a platform able to increase elderly autonomy and assist them in carrying out activities of daily living. In particular, we aim to support older adults affected by mild dementia with useful and usable means to increase their awareness and control of their current lifestyle by providing them with...

The annual worldwide cost of Alzheimer’s dementia was 777.81 billion Euro in 2015. This number will rise to 7.41 trillion Euro in 2050. Early diagnosis would save up to $7.9 trillion in medical and care costs by 2050 in the US alone. However, the emergent pathology is highly variable across people, necehighly variable across people, necessitating...

PHARMA-COG aims to develop a new integrated model to accelerate the development of drug candidates for MS, PKD and AD. The innovation relies on a 'multidimensional matrix' approach, integrating all available and renewed inputs (biomarkers/animal, human models/physiological and pharmacological challenges, Phase 0/1/1b to reduce the attrition rate...