Research Projects

Dementia causes long and oppressive suffering to patients and their relatives and imposes enormous costs on society. About 25 million people suffered from dementia in 2000. As a 4-fold increase of this number is expected by 2050, dementia is one main health issue of the next decades. Alzheimer's disease (AD) covers 60-70% of all dementia cases. No...

The mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have remained poorly understood while com- mon animal models have not helped in finding efficient therapies for the disease. This pro- ject aims to generate new human cellular models allowing for the purification of specific neural cell types involved in AD. We generate patient neural cells through...

Increasing evidence suggests that the genetic information in our bodies can vary from cell to cell. Such variation has also been found in the brain, although its consequences for brain function or disease remain largely unknown. In this project, we will study the role of genomic instability in Alzheimer's disease and related tauopathies. The...

Diabetes mellitus, hypertension, obesity, hypercholesterolemia, smoking and physical inactivity are common in elderly persons and are all associated with an increased risk of myocardial infarction, stroke and dementia. Efficacious treatments of these cardiovascular diseases are available, but in elderly patients with multiple cardiovascular...

The overall objective of Home4Dem is to address the challenge of dementia care that is a major burden for industrialised societies, through the large-scale deployment in the market of an innovative ICT platform to enable people with dementia to live at home independently and to maintain an active social life, thus improving their quality of life...

BBMRI-ERIC: the Biobanking and BioMolecular resources Research Infrastructure - European Research Infrastructure Consortium, aims to establish, operate and develop a Pan-European distributed research infrastructure in order to facilitate the access to biological resources as well as facilities and to support high quality biomolecular and biomedical...

Given the increasing number of patients/consumers with dementia, political action is urgently required to prepare the health care services throughout Europe to deliver cost effective high quality long-term care to people concerned. Currently there is a lack of clinical research data of patients/consumers and informal caregivers to develop best...

The number of elderly living with cognitive impairment is growing rapidly due to increasing life expectancy. The percentage of those who live alone depends upon the condition (i.e. roughly 30% of those diagnosed with dementia) but the majority would like to live in their own home or with family, provided that it is safe, comfortable, and cost...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an age-related chronic neurodegenerative disease with four main pathological changes in the brain: amyloid plaques, fibrillary tau tangles, inflammation and neuronal loss. Phagocytes around amyloid plaques in late onset AD (LOAD) may be neurotoxic but have limited motility and phagocytic activity, suggesting a...

Neurodegenerative diseases are a ticking time-bomb for health care systems because they are care-intensive and will soon become much more wide-spread due to increased life expectancy. Their most common form is Alzheimer's disease (AD), in which the amyloid-ß (Aß) peptide aggregates to amyloid fibers that accumulate in plaques in the human brain. We...

The mammalian central nervous system is an intricate and fragile structure which on one hand is open to change in order to store information, but at the same time is vulnerable to damage from injury, pathogen invasion or neurodegenerative diseases (NDs). Microglia, representing the brain`s innate immune system, execute a number of physiological...

Dementia raises complex challenges for people with dementia, their families, and society. The European Parliament has called for investment in high quality, innovative technology research to improve dementia care but so far there has been little benefit because research has generally been limited, small scale and methodologically flawed. In...