Research Projects

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...

Pharmaceutical industry, as well as basic science, depend on robust data and scientific rigor as key drivers for decision making, patent strength and time-to-market, which in turn will determine knowledge gain and availability of new treatments to patients. Recent publications report challenges with the robustness, rigor, and/or validity of...

In recent years, it has been demonstrated that sleep not only plays a crucial role in cognitive, emotional, and immunological functions but also helps to clear the brain from metabolic waste products via the recently discovered glymphatic system. A physiological marker closely associated with glymphatic clearance is electroencephalographic (EEG)...

Since Alzheimer disease (AD) affects up to 50% of individuals above 85, we will witness the three-fold increase in the number of patients by 2050 if no efficient therapy will be found. The FLORIN offers non-invasive real-time monitoring of key mechanisms involved in the AD pathogenesis by avant-garde bioimaging at temporal resolution less than 1...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The anticipated pandemic increase in the number of Alzheimer disease (AD) and dementia cases carries serious implications for society. The goal of the MIND-AD project is to identify effective prevention strategies for AD/dementia tailored to different at-risk groups. The project is based on experiences and data from five ongoing European...

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+) is a central redox cofactor and the limiting substrate of key metabolic enzymes. The constellation of cellular functions in which NAD+ is involved makes its availability critical for cell survival, and its depletion is a leading factor in a number of diseases in humans, ranging from rare inherited defects to...