Research Projects

The project will build an application to help informal caregivers of demented people (typically a spouse or an adult child) understand and aid their demented relatives and help them manage their new life situation.

Neurological disorders, ranging from epilepsy, autism, dementias, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases affect 1B people worldwide. Currently, Europe has the greatest percentage of population aged 65 or over (25%) and these numbers are expected to drastically grow (3% per year) increasing the population affected by brain disorders. Many neurological...

The fact that the brain is influenced by the microorganisms that make up the gut microbiome substantially widens the scope of how we need to view human neurocognition and behaviour. However, a clear understanding of underlying mechanisms is scant and mainly grounded in animal work. This proposal aims at major contributions towards overcoming these...

A range of debilitating neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, arise from the formation of amyloidogenic protein aggregates. Molecular chaperones can counteract aggregate formation, but their molecular action mechanisms remain poorly understood. This is chiefly due to the fundamental challenge of resolving...

NEUREKA will bring a paradigm shift in drug discovery for neurological diseases, a sector that suffers multiple, repeated failures exacerbating the economical and societal burden of these incurable diseases. It will do so by addressing a crucial shortcoming: the lack of in vitro systems faithfully reproducing brain pathology that enable the...

I here propose a strategy to investigate cell type-specific effects of non-coding regulatory elements, which have been shown to play a fundamental role during the molecular pathophysiology of complex neurodegenerative diseases such as glaucoma in the eye or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's in the brain. By leveraging techniques from various scientific...

Alzheimer´s disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, with over 35 million people suffering from it worldwide, and it constitutes a personal and societal tragedy of immense proportions. Fifty years of intense research have revealed many key elements of the biology of this neurodegenerative disorder. However, our understanding of the...

The aim of the project is to utilise state-of-the-art in ICT in order to develop an integrated solution for the  self-management of dementia patients, and develop innovative tools to support this procedure. This  solution can be conceived as an integrated platform enabling distant monitoring of patient status and  facilitating personalised...

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurological disease worldwide after Alzheimer’s and is the fastest growing one. Over 10 million people in the world are living with this disease, of which about 90% will experience difficulties with their voice as the disease progresses.At Teleatherapy, our goal is to make speech and language...

The environment is one of the most crucial determinants of health. The Global Burden of Disease report estimates an emerging impact in terms of disability and reducing the quality of life worldwide, particularly for the aging populations. One of the root causes of this decline is likely to derive from the interaction of socio-environmental risk...

The DEM-CHILD project focusses on the main cause for childhood dementia in Europe, the neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCLs). The NCLs are neurodegenerative diseases characterized by dementia, blindness, epilepsy and physical decline leading to an early death of the patients. Since no cure is currently available, these disorders represent a serious...

FP7 neuGRID is being developed aiming to provide large sets of brain images paired with grid-based computationally intensive algorithms for studies of neurodegenerative diseases. Two infrastructures with similar aims are operational or under construction overseas. In Canada, the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) aims to develop a pan-Canadian...