Research Projects

The goal of BATCure is to advance the development of new therapeutic options for a group of rare lysosomal diseases - neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCL) or Batten disease. There are > thousand affected across Europe, with a combined incidence of c.1:100 000. The NCLs are devastating and debilitating genetic disorders that mainly affect children...

Normal aging is associated with declines in episodic memory and executive functions. Research suggests that around 20-50% of clinically healthy individuals show significant accumulation of amyloid, one of the hallmark biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease but it has been difficult to establish the functional impact of amyloid burden in healthy older...

Human populations are impregnated by various types of chemical pollutants reported as hazardous waste present in the environment. Certain pollutants have adverse effects on brain, but the underlying mechanisms and time-window exposures are still unknown, as well as their contribution on dementia, the 7th leading cause of death. EXPOSIGNALZ project...

There is an urgent medical need for efficient diagnostics for Alzheimer’s disease and related tauopathies, as well as disease modifying treatments, due to the heavy burden of the disease on patients, families and society. To address this public health issue, TAME R&I training network gathers leading academic and industrial experts in tau research...

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia. It affects millions of people and is expected to increase in the coming decades due to aging of the population. Optogenetics combines optics and genetics to gain insight into brain function by genetically inserting light-sensitive transmembrane proteins into neurons. Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2)...

Therapies for neurological disorders often involve deeply invasive brain operations or implants. A largely overlooked aspect of these conditions is the high comorbidity of GI-related disorders. Although the top-down relationship between the brain and peripheral organs has dominated the field, its now clear that activity of peripheral organs, in...

Prevention of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and dementia is a global public health priority. EURO-FINGERS builds upon the successful experiences of two multimodal prevention trials: the Finnish Geriatric Intervention Study to Prevent Cognitive Impairment and Disability (FINGER) and the JPND-funded MIND-AD. The FINGER intervention trial showed that a...

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) are the cornerstone of many regenerative medicine projects, and offer researchers a powerful new approach to model and study a range of diseases. The European Bank for Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (EBiSC) was established to provide researchers across academia and the pharmaceutical industry with disease...

In response to the need to tackle increasingly complex medical research questions, a growing amount of human health data is being collected, either in routine Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) databases, through research-driven cohort studies, in biobanks or related efforts. However, data sources are typically fragmented and contain information...

The secondary prevention of Alzheimer’s dementia (AD) is achievable if we can identify individuals at risk of disease progression defined by biomarker evidence of AD pathology and no or only minimal clinical symptoms and engage them in a standing adaptive clinical trial, of the highest quality, testing multiple interventions.

To achieve this, EPAD...

Critical to our understanding of Alzheimers disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative dementias (NDDs), as well as to finding disease-modifying therapies, is the development of biomarkers for the underlying disease processes. To facilitate improved diagnostics and drug discovery, we have developed methods to measure markers of amyloid and tau...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a devastating disorder without a cure. Recent research demonstrates a link between AD and exposure to high levels of air pollution, yet detailed understanding of the connection does not exist. Air pollution, a massive public health issue known to pose a major threat to humans, is an increasing global concern. Researchers...