Research Projects

The study of protein aggregates and how they damage neuronal cells is important in order to understand the initiation and progression of several neurodegenerative diseases - including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD). The aggregation from the native monomeric proteins to beta sheet containing amyloid structures involves the...

Cognitive and mental disorders such as Dementia, Alzheimer´s, depression and Parkinson's disease, some of them closely related to ageing populations, have high social and economic burden. Nowadays, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, gerontologists and general practitioners rely on subjective, time-consuming semi-structured interviews and...

NeuroPsyCAD is a cloud-based reporting service that provides an accurate and early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric disorders. To achieve high accuracies, NeuroPsyCAD statistically compares a brain scan of a patient with a normative, human, and population representative database using machine-learning algorithms. It also analyses the brain as a whole...

Glaucoma is the world's leading cause of irreverisble blindness, affecting 20 million people in Europe and the US. Known as the Alzheimer’s of the eye, glaucoma is a neurodegenerative disorder that causes deterioration in peripheral vision. Affected patients report ‘seeing through a black tunnel’. Treatments to halt vision loss are available...

I am a stem cell biologist specialized on modeling human neurodegenerative diseases. During my PhD with Dr. O. Brüstle (University of Bonn), I was trained in human stem cell and reprogramming technologies working on human models for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). As a postdoc at the Salk Institute with Dr. F. H. Gage, I acquired and strong foundation in...

Air pollution (AP) remains prevalent globally. Its impact on dementia risk is unclear. We propose to investigate the association of dementia with AP and explore mediation effects on the association from other factors. We will examine data of 2776 participants aged >=60 years who were randomly recruited from urban and rural of China. Their baseline...

In dementia at the end of life, cognitive and physical decline imply that control is typically lost. CONT-END will examine control in the context of three emerging interventions which contain a controversial element of striving for control in the process of dying with dementia: advance care planning of the end of life, use of new technology to...

With western countries aging faster, the neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s etc. pose serious threat to quality of life, especially for people over 65 years[1]. In Europe, number of people suffering with dementia, which results from neuronal degeneration, is on the rise it is expected to be double in the next 20...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects more than 7 million people in Europe and this figure is expected to double every 20 years. Despite intensive efforts, no disease-modifying treatments or preventive strategies are available. The lack of specific, sensitive and minimally invasive diagnostics to identify people with early-stage AD to be included in...

The brain barriers function to protect the central nervous system (CNS) from neurotoxic compounds. By the same traits they unfortunately block delivery of drugs to the CNS thus hindering proper diagnosis and effective treatment of neurological disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. The unusual complexity of the brain...

The WHO has identified neurological disorders as a major burden and emerging challenge to global healthcare systems. These range from causes such as stroke and dementia, to injuries and viral infections. The prevalence of strokes and dementia are strongly linked to increasing age, for example stroke risk more than doubles every decade after 55...

Today, five out of ten diseases worldwide resulting in long-term disability are related to the central nervous system. Due to the immense complexity and inter-individual variability of the human mind and brain there are still no effective and side effect free treatment options for many serious neuropsychiatric disorders, such as major depression...