Research Projects

Orientation in space, time, and person is the essence of the behaving self, and the bedrock of neurological and psychiatric mental status examination. States of disorientation may be the hallmark manifestation of several neuropsychiatric disorders. Despite orientation’s central role in health and disease, orientation has almost never been a subject...

The origins of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) remain elusive. The long pre-clinical phase of AD is universally recognized, but it is not known when predisposition for AD develops nor when the first signs and symptoms become discernable. In this regard, an essential role is played by the ‘reserve’ capacity of the brain, which is built up in early life and...

The goal of the proposed research project is to analyze temporal disturbances in mental disorders and, as a result, to create a “map” of pathological experiences of time. The map will be phenomenological in nature, i.e. cutting across existing classifications of mental disorders and avoiding untimely biological explanations. The project is highly...

Neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal dementias and prion diseases affect ~50 million people worldwide. Alzheimer’s disease, the most prevalent form, affects ~6% of the population over 65 years of age and is one of the leading causes of death in the elderly. All these diseases have...

The increasing number of elderly people will have a major impact on the prevalence of age-related diseases, which will pose major challenges to keep health systems in Europe sustainable. Current knowledge is insufficient to identify the transition of normal brain ageing into Alzheimer`s Disease (AD)-like brain damage. Elucidation of the genes and...

Critical to our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and also to finding therapies is determining how key pathological factors interact and relate to neuronal toxicity, symptoms and disease progression. My research has focussed on amyloid beta (Aβ) moities and demonstrated that cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Aβ42 correlates with cerebral Aβ...

Future treatment of incurable neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA), and Huntington’s disease (HD), has to be tailored to individual patients or cohorts of patients to obtain an optimal effect. The STEMMAD project is aimed to create a highly innovative...

This reintegration project will give to the applicant the opportunity to use the additional insights and expertise that he has gained during his previous MC-IEF to build on his experience for an independent academic career. The aim of this project is to investigate the structure - activity relationship (SAR) of synthesized peptides that selectively...

Inhibitory chondroitin sulphate proteoglycans (CSPGs) have several roles in CNS damage and repair, revealed by their digestion with chondroitinase. Most recently, digestion of CSPGs in the limbic system and cortex has led to a very substantial enhancement of memory. The effects of CSPGs on plasticity and memory are largely through their...

CombiDiag DN aims to develop an AI-data-driven peripheral biomarker based combinatorial diagnostic protocol for early stages of Alzheimers disease (AD), a major form of dementia, and to train a new generation of fellows for this interdisciplinary field. Dementia, a devastating disease of older age, is the challenge of our lifetime and one of the...

Stroke-caused cognitive and neuromotor impairment is currently an increasing burden: post-stroke deficits are commonly believed to be treated with rehabilitation. Direct medical costs of stroke are stimated to increase up to 94.3 billion USD only in US. The indirect costs, including non-healthcare costs, are estimated at 15.9 billion. The journey...

The role of inflammation and innate immune system in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has been recently emphasized as GWAS and WES studies as well as functional studies have identified several AD-associated genes, including TREM2, ABI3, and PLCG2 that are expressed selectively or preferentially in microglia in the brain. These genetic and functional...