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...

The last two decades have witnessed the increasing role of patient, user and civil society organizations (POs and CSOs) in the production of knowledge on diseases and health problems. Rich and detailed studies have shown that this phenomenon entails new forms of activism. It also questions the modes of governance of knowledge, as well as the role...

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...

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...

'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...

Ageing is the main correlate of dementia and several other neurodegenerative diseases which currently affect more than 6 million people in Europe. Molecular understanding of these brain conditions is important for their prevention and treatment. In mice, pathological granular structures positive for periodic acid-Schiff stain have been found in the...

'Our memories define who we are and allow us to live independently. Conscious memory is commonly split into two components; “episodic memory” for events that are specific in time and place, and “semantic memory” for our conceptual knowledge about the world. The acquisition of both episodic and semantic memories depends upon the hippocampal...

The goal of Project RELIEVE is to build the very first non-invasive effective closed-loop monitoring and intervention system for brain-related disorders. The outcomes can be used to treat or manage various psychiatric and neurological disorders. We do this by pushing the technological boundaries in two separate domains. (1) AI domain: We develop 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...

Expansion of a hexanucleotide repeat G4C2 in the non-coding region of chromosome 9 open reading frame 72 (C9orf72) is the most common genetic cause for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). ALS is a fatal condition characterized by progressive motor deficits, degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons (MNs) and...

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...