Research Projects

Neurodegenerative disorders such as, Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), stroke, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and chronic stress create a major economic burden to society and a substantial reduction in quality of life for patients and families. The development of neuroregenerative therapies is notoriously difficult and...

Cholesterol is a structural component of membranes and plays a key role in human health by regulating the fluidity of membranes and affecting signaling pathways. Intracellular cholesterol transport proteins (CTP) are responsible for maintaining cholesterol homeostasis by regulating local cholesterol concentrations, arising from de novo biosynthesis...

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...

'We aim develop in-vivo imaging biomarker of multidrug transporter function as a generic tool for the prediction, diagnosis, monitoring and prognosis of major CNS diseases, as well as to provide support and guidance for therapeutic interventions. Multidrug transporters actively transport substrates (including multiple CNS drugs) against...

Over half of Parkinson Disease patients develop cortical dysfunctions leading to Parkinson Disease Dementia (PDD). The cognitive changes are primarily driven by pathological alpha-synuclein (a-syn) protein aggregates with secondary synaptic dysfunctions in the cortex. Microglia plays a key role in synapse maintenance and clearance of aggregated a...

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 EU population is increasingly exposed to new physical and chemical agents in the environment, some of which may be detrimental to public health. Of these, electromagnetic fields (EMF) are one of the most ubiquitous, with new EMF technologies and novel applications being actively developed and commercialised. To address pertinent questions on...

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...

Neurological disorders affect over 540 million individuals in Europe alone, yet effective treatments are limited, primarily due to the challenge of delivering therapeutic compounds across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (BCSFB). This project aims to develop a novel, virus-inspired technology that utilizes...

Age represents by far the largest risk factor for dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia. However, not every person will develop dementia during aging, indicating that age-related processes may not inescapably lead to dementia. The elucidation of the fundamental processes occurring in aging will likely offer new options to prevent or...