Research Projects

Despite being viewed as a simple transport conduit, the oviduct can determine a successful pregnancy and has a life-long impact on our health and wellbeing. Also called the fallopian tube, our understanding of tubal function remains limited, owing to the ethical limitations of human studies and the poor translations of animal studies to people. The...

The proposed project aims to investigate the contribution of thalamocortical projections to high cognitive functions such as speechprocessing, working memory and attention in sighted and unsighted populations. In the last decades, advances made in magneticresonance imaging (MRI) have shed light on the cortical regions subserving these processes...

Loneliness, which can be defined as the negative mental states (e.g. sadness, despair) that people experience when they feel that they do not have enough relationships, or not the right kinds of relationships, is a widespread phenomenon in many societies. Even prior to the current pandemic, surveys from Europe and North-America reported that 20 to...

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in available information. This has created an urgent need for fast statistical and machine learning methods that can scale up to big data sets. Standard approaches, including the now routinely used Bayesian methods, are becoming computationally infeasible, especially in complex models with many parameters and...

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...

Neurodegenerative diseases share similar hallmarks such as protein aggregation, suggesting that impaired protein degradation may be a common denominator. The major cellular pathways mediating protein degradation are the Ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and autophagy, both regulated by ubiquitin signaling. However, aside from specific mutations in...

Existing pharmaceutical methods can only target 15% of all proteins in the human proteome. Given this limitation, pharmaceutical companies are running out of options to develop effective drugs to tackle hard-to-treat diseases. To have a better chance of fighting these diseases, further targets of the remaining, so far undruggable 85% of our...

Synucleinopathies are neurodegenerative conditions characterized by an accumulation of the protein alpha-synuclein, including Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. A long asymptomatic phase precedes the onset of invalidating symptoms. Early diagnostics and treatments are hampered by an incomplete understanding of the pathophysiological...

Neuronal circuits must balance stability and plasticity. How this balance is compromised in brain disorders remains one of the most fundamental questions in neuroscience. Pioneering studies in the field established that homeostatic mechanisms stabilize the function of a system at a set-point level of activity. Recently, we have identified bona fide...

"As memorizing new information relies on distinguishing the new from the familiar, novelty detection is closely tied to memory. Yet, the exact nature of this link remains unclearare they two sides of the same function or rather distinct yet interacting processes? Critically, there are different types of novelty: absolute (new stimulus) or...

The family of G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) comprises more than 800 human cell surface receptors that perceive and transmit extracellular stimuli into the cell interior. Due to their involvement in numerous biochemical processes, GPCRs represent prime targets for the treatment of various diseases and are modulated by more than 30% of approved...

TREM2MEDS emerges from the ERC PoC 2022 project TREM2ENGINES (Grant agreement ID: 101069395), which validated the efficacy of a novel treatment for Alzheimers Disease (AD) and Nasu-Hakola Disease (NHD) in murine models. A relevant proportion of AD cases and all forms of NHD are caused by pathogenic mutations in the TREM2 gene, which lead to...