Research Projects

In our everyday life, we ascribe certain emotional value to some objects. More specifically, we ascribe a valence to some objects, which is the degree to which something can be pleasurable or averse, leading to an emotional response when we interact or remember them. In the act of learning and remembering an object, the brain executes a complex set...

CADASIL, a rare disease of the small blood vessels, is caused by mutations in NOTCH3 and can cause cognitive decline leading to dementia. Vascular disease is the second most common cause of dementia with the burden set to increase with population aging. Insights into CADASIL will prove instrumental in understanding and treating the vascular...

Cytokines, such as TNF-, hold immense significance as protein biomarkers, pivotal for diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic management across various clinical disorders like Alzheimers disease, sepsis, and cancer. Nonetheless, prevailing techniques like enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) prove to be...

Cytokines, such as TNF-, hold immense significance as protein biomarkers, pivotal for diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic management across various clinical disorders like Alzheimers disease, sepsis, and cancer. Nonetheless, prevailing techniques like enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) prove to be...

Protein phosphorylation is a process that activates biological and cellular pathways. This process is carried out by enzymes called protein kinases that add phosphates to proteins. Protein kinases are crucial drug targets involved in the onset and progression of human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimers disease. Growing evidence suggests that...

Dysregulated interactions between biomolecules can lead to changes in cell signalling and gene expression, both common drivers of human disease. A detailed understanding of these interactions is vital for drug development, often targeting such interactions for therapeutic effects. In this project, I aim to develop an optical microscopy tool to...

Dementia is a major healthcare challenge worldwide due to its high incidence and its strong impact on the life quality of patients and on society as a whole. Development of treatments for the mitigation of memory impairment in patients with dementia has proven very challenging, partly due to our limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms of...

Stroke is a leading and increasingly important cause of death and disability in the EU. Yet, we have only few effective treatments and an unsatisfactory understanding of human stroke pathophysiology. Current diagnostic algorithms fail to capture pathophysiological mechanisms in daily clinical practice, hindering the allocation of patients to...

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a medical imaging technique that displays in vivo brain-wide metabolic processes. Prior to PET image acquisition, a tracer, labelled with a positron emitting isotope, is injected to the patient. This so-called radiotracer distributes over the body and accumulates in e.g. inflammatory tissue. To date, the...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients stay in a prodromal phase over many years before robust cognitive decline. During this phase, complex molecular events lead to cellular alterations, resulting in aberrant synaptic activity and chronic inflammation which leads to neuronal death and cognitive impairment. My unpublished work, shows that melanin...

Protein phosphorylation, mediated by kinases, plays a pivotal role in cellular regulation, with kinase dysregulation strongly associated with diseases like cancer, inflammation, and neurodegenerative disorders. Alzheimer's disease (AD) represents a significant global health challenge as the population ages at an accelerating pace. A key...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects over 55 million people worldwide, with no effective treatments currently available. Understanding early-stage mechanisms of the disease is critical to developing new therapeutic approaches. Microglial cells, key regulators of amyloid-beta (Aβ) clearance and neuroinflammation, are implicated in the progression of AD...