Research Projects

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...

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) of aging are a growing burden on societies. Although studies on the degeneration of neurons have been a main focus of research, increasing evidence points to synapses as the site where Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD) begin. There is growing evidence that synapses are...

The goal of the TASPPI European Training Network (ETN) is the establishment of a highly interdisciplinary research and educational training platform for early stage scientists in the Chemical Life Sciences to overcome the inherent boundaries between academia and industry and to increase their employability in both areas. To this end we have teamed...

Recent Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on circadian clock (CC) have laid the foundation for ground-breaking approaches to treat many diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is a current public health priority. Amplifying the demographic burden of the rising numbers of patients is the low success rate of AD therapies. Given that CC genes...

We aim to elucidate the exact role of epigenetic dysregulation in the brainstem in the pathogenesis of AD. For this purpose, we will examine post-mortem brainstem tissue derived from AD patients, and matched controls, for epigenetic differences. By investigating AD-specific epigenetic profiles in the blood of individuals suffering from Mild...

Noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus (LC) mediate attention, memory, and arousal. Based on previous data, we suggest that LC degeneration is a new common mechanism in the early onset and/or progression of neurodegeneration and dementia in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Down syndrome (DS) and Parkinson's disease (PD). The goal of our project is...

Remembering where things are, for example, where you parked your car, is essential in everyday life. Without spatial memory, we would continuously be engaged in looking for our car, keys, phone, or glasses. Despite its obvious importance, a lot is still unknown about object location memory (OLM). This proposal aims to uncover mechanisms underlying...

Voltage-gated potassium (Kv) channel are neuronal and allow the temporal encoding of information as spike trains in neural circuits. It is therefore important to investigate how each Kv channel is able to do this so that we can better understand how brains work and generate plastic behaviour. In addition genetic diseases (channelopathies)...

Proteins and peptides have a generic tendency to convert from their soluble states into well-organized aggregates characterized by a fibrillar morphology and an extended cross-beta structure. Such transitions can give rise to over 40 pathological conditions ranging from neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease...

This proposal aims to increase our understanding of the role of translational failure in human neurodegenerative diseases. We recently discovered the mechanism by which protein misfolding leads to neurodegeneration in prion disease. The pathway involved is a generic cellular pathway, a branch of the unfolded protein response (UPR) that controls...

There are an increasing number of people across Europe with debilitating speech pathologies (e.g., due to stroke, Parkinson's, etc). These groups face communication problems that can lead to social exclusion. They are now being further marginalised by a new wave of speech technology that is increasingly woven into everyday life but which is not...

Socio-economic needs for advances in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) are more pressing than ever. Lessons learned from clinical trial failures have led to important conceptual advances. The field notably shifted away from a purely neurocentric view, largely since Genome-Wide Association Studies identified several risk genes that are...