Research Projects

Assemblies of tau and α-synuclein were shown to spread along interconnected neuronal networks suggesting broadly relevant therapeutic directions for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. This requires a pre-clinical stage of development that has yet to be met. The scale of neurodegenerative disease burden in Europe calls for an unprecedented...

Neuroinflammatory disease, in particular multiple sclerosis affects more than 700.000 people within Europe alone. European countries are at the forefront of neuroimmunological research and students in medicine and biology are greatly attracted by the field. Neuroimmunology research further impacts our understanding of the ethiopathology of other...

The European costs of dementia were estimated €177 billion and there is a growing gap between burden and budget. The debilitation associated with dementia makes it the most feared of conditions related to ageing . Modelling studies have estimated that if obesity rates dropped by 5%, dementia prevalence rates would be lower by 6% and a decline in...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common neurodegenerative disorder affecting about 20 million people worldwide. Although aging is considered to be the most important risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, growing evidence from epidemiological studies suggest that type-2 diabetes (T2DM) increases the risk factor of AD. While compelling evidence...

ProACT targets Europe’s 50 million multimorbid patients to proactively self-manage and offset the EU’s annual €700billion cost of chronic disease management. ProACT aims at providing and evaluating an open application programming interface to integrate a variety of new and existing technologies to advance ‘home based’ integrated care (IC). Cloud...

The vision of IASIS is to turn the wave of data heading our way into actionable knowledge for decision makers. This will be achieved by integrating data from disparate sources, including genomics, electronic health records and bibliography, and applying advanced analytics methods to discover useful patterns. Big Data in healthcare is in its early...

Internet-based and micro technologies have changed the way we live. But elderly people receiving care have not always benefited from these developments. IntegrAAL uses technology to help improve care for older people. Older people are often cared for by many different people, known as a circle of care. This circle may include informal carers as...

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...

The overall aim is to further the understanding of the BBB in health and disease states towards the development of innovative brain delivery systems, especially for biopharmaceuticals (e.g., peptides, antibodies, etc.) and the identification of novel disease drug targets (Alzheimer’s Disease, MS, metabolic disease).

The related key deliverables...

As the number of older people in Europe grows, increasing healthy life years is a priority. Cognitive decline, dementia (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, AD), sleep disturbances and depression, all related to psychological distress and anxiety, are significant drivers of reduced quality of life in older adults. This project builds on evidence that...

The conversion of normally soluble and functional proteins into insoluble protein aggregates known as amyloids are linked to more than 50 human disorders, including several common forms of age-related dementia such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Amyloids exist as long, rope-like structures known as fibrils which can self-associate into...

Joint Action on Dementia 2015-2018. The Joint Action will focus on two phases on work: approximately 12 months on developing a consensus on the best evidence of effective action in 4 key areas (diagnosis and post-diagnostic support; crisis and care coordination; quality of care in residential care settings; and dementia-friendly communities); and...