Research Projects

Imaging of distribution of drugs in mice delivers accurate information for confirmation that the mechanism of action elaborated in cell-based assays is also operative in vivo. These data are critical for the transfer of drug discovery process from pre-clinical to clinical phase. To enable the imaging, drugs should be labeled with easily detectable...

Large non-coding RNAs and microRNAs are important regulators of gene expression that may control both physiological and pathological processes such as neurodegenerative disorders. Given the complexity of neurodegenerative disorders, studying the role of non-coding RNAs would be necessary to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying ageing...

As a result of the aging population of the developed countries, neurodegenerative diseases (NDD) afflict an ever-increasing number of people. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent NDD with more than 36 million people currently affected worldwide. Although AD has been studied for more than a hundred years, its “ultimate” trigger is not yet...

Interictal epileptic discharges (IEDs) are pathological brain activities involving sharp spikes in electrical field potentials that occur preferentially during sleep. In epilepsy, IEDs occur between seizures, and often in deep brain regions such as the medial temporal lobe (MTL).IEDs during sleep disrupt memory and are associated with cognitive...

Europe faces an enormous human toll of brain disorders, with an estimated 83 million people affected, and economic costs amounting to approximately €800 billion. Drug treatments for brain disorders prove often less than effective with a lack of selective cell targeting. A failure to develop new drugs has led major Pharmaceutical companies to...

Understanding of the normal and diseased brain crucially depends on reliable knowledge of its microstructure. Important functions are mediated by small cortical units (columns) and even small changes in the microstructure can cause debilitating diseases. So far, this microstructure can only be determined using invasive methods such as, e.g., ex...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a major medical problem and is currently an issue of global general interest as the total number of people with dementia is projected to reach ~80M in 2030 and almost duplicating this number by 2050. The lack of an efficient and affordable solution in the AD's health care sector has motivated our company Alzohis to...

Modern network science has introduced exciting new opportunities for understanding the brain as a complex system of interacting units in both health and disease and across the human lifespan. Despite the rapidly growing interdisciplinary science of complex networks, which spans the range from genetic and metabolic networks all the way up to social...

Bio2Brain aims to create a trans-European network of industrially oriented specialists fully trained and experienced, a significant driving force in innovating novel technologies to deliver biopharmaceuticals safely and via the nasal route of administration to the central nervous system (CNS). Diseases of the CNS and the spinal cord affect around...

Spider silk is Nature’s high performance material that has the potential to revolutionize the materials industry. However, production and spinning of artificial spider silk fibers are challenging, and current methods to produce silk fibers include denaturing conditions which prevent the silk proteins from assembling into fibers in the same complex...

Alzheimers disease (AD) is the most common cause of dementia and a major global health challenge. AD has a long pre-symptomatic phase spanning several decades. The accuracy of clinical AD diagnostics is mediocre, especially in primary care. This results in suboptimal treatment and care, which is especially problematic in light of emerging anti...

Neurodegeneration associated with Parkinson’s (PD) and Alzheimer’s (AD) diseases begins several years prior to the appearance of clinical symptoms and in total, over eight million people in Europe were living with PD or AD in year 2010. Currently, there are no diagnostic tools which allow for early diagnose and/or monitoring the progression these...