Research Projects

The recently approved drugs for Alzheimers disease (AD), targeting amyloid plaques removal, only mildly slow patients cognitive decline as neuronal loss starts decades before plaque deposition. To delay AD onset before symptoms development, prevention of neuronal death should be prioritised instead. An early AD pathological event is intraneuronal...

The objective of ROSETTA is to help community dwelling people with progressive chronic disabilities, such as Alzheimer’s Disease, to retain their autonomy and quality of life as much as possible and to support their (in)formal carers by developing and providing an ICT system that offers activity guidance and awareness services for independent...

“SAVE” is dedicated to the elderly persons, suffering (or at risk of) age-related chronic illnesses and/or mild cognitive issues/disabilities. For these, and a range of “not-so-fit” persons, “SAVE” aims to avoid psychosocial exclusion by “restoring the referential”. The unique goal of “orientation” in a supportive environment – in terms of position...

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO, ADI), 44 million people around the world have some form of dementia, for which there is no effective intervention, to halt or reverse the progressive cognitive impairment. As Europe’s population is ageing, long-term care for elderly citizens will become an increasing cost for society. To manage this...

The resolution limit of about 250 nm in conventional optical microscopes is problematic in the study of structural biology, since proteins, macromolecules and nuclear acids are typically much smaller than 100 nm. Single-molecule localization microscopy is able to circumvent this limit by sequentially and stochastically switching on/activating...

The Hope” solution consists of an integrated, smart platform that enables the elderly people with Alzheimer’s disease to use innovative technology for a more independent life, easy access to information, monitor their health, which provides a basis for integrating services for the elderly population while they are at home.  HOPE is a self-operated...

Despite impressive advances in almost every field of neuroscience, our insights into brain function remain largely confined to its building blocks at the microscopic level, and to phenomenological descriptions at the macroscopic level. Understanding how complex mental functions originate from electrical and chemical processes in brain cells...

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common inherited heart disease (prevalence 1:200 - 1:500), manifested by thickening of cardiac walls, increasing risks of arrhythmia, and sudden cardiac death. HCM affects all ages - it is the leading cause of death among young athletes. Comorbidities due to gene mutations include altered vascular...

The detection of biomarkers in body fluids is of great importance for disease early diagnosis. The clinical practice uses typically immunoassay methods (e.g. ELISA, Enzyme-Linked Immuno Sorbent Assay, and related techniques) for biomarker determination. Unfortunately, these techniques fail dramatically in a wide variety of cases where the...

Understanding how fast events at synapses are converted into long-lasting changes of neuronal acti- vity is a very important question in neuroscience. Several recent studies demonstrated that synapses and nuclei are connected by bidirectional communication routes that enable the efficient transfer of information and regulate the long-term...

Disrupted neuronal connectivity and synapse dysfunction can manifest clinically as a range of emotional, behavioural and cognitive symptoms that are common to, and often overlapping in, mental disorders (MDs) such as major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disorders (NDs) such as Alzheimers disease and...

Alzheimer´s (AD) and Huntington´s disease (HD) result from the erroneous communication of neurons at synapses in different brain areas (neocortex, hippocampus, striatum). The protein BDNF regulates synaptic communication under healthy conditions. However, insufficient release of BDNF from neurons and defective BDNF signaling in target neurons...