Research Projects

Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) of aging are a growing burden on societies. Although studies on the degeneration of neurons have been a main focus of research, increasing evidence points to synapses as the site where Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD) and Huntington’s disease (HD) begin. There is growing evidence that synapses are...

Dementia is an enormous burden on society. Patients require life-long care and there is no cure or symptomatic treatment. At early phases, dementia is closely associated with synaptic degeneration and this correlates well with Tau pathology in >20 Tauopathies. Interestingly, historic observations in hamsters and squirrels show that when they enter...

"Dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases are among the leading causes of disability worldwide and have an immense societal impact due to lack of effective treatments. For developing better preventive and therapeutic strategies, it is essential to clarify their still largely elusive genetic basis and pathophysiology. Emerging insights from the...

The goal of the TASPPI European Training Network (ETN) is the establishment of a highly interdisciplinary research and educational training platform for early stage scientists in the Chemical Life Sciences to overcome the inherent boundaries between academia and industry and to increase their employability in both areas. To this end we have teamed...

Recent Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on circadian clock (CC) have laid the foundation for ground-breaking approaches to treat many diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD). AD is a current public health priority. Amplifying the demographic burden of the rising numbers of patients is the low success rate of AD therapies. Given that CC genes...

We aim to elucidate the exact role of epigenetic dysregulation in the brainstem in the pathogenesis of AD. For this purpose, we will examine post-mortem brainstem tissue derived from AD patients, and matched controls, for epigenetic differences. By investigating AD-specific epigenetic profiles in the blood of individuals suffering from Mild...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the major cause of dementia. The disease has an escalating impact on public health due to an increasing prevalence among the aging population in Europe and globally. In light of the first disease-modifying therapies becoming available, early diagnosis and precise disease staging are crucial for timely implementation of...

Memory for unique personal experiences (episodic memory) is critical to daily life functioning. This form of long-term memory also displays the largest degree of age-related decline. This condition is accelerated in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), which is often the precursor for emerging Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Since AD produces...

An increasingly aging population suffering from neurodegenerative diseases represents one of the biggest challenges for Western societies. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most prevalent neurodegenerative disease with over 50 million patients worldwide and an estimated cost of 1 trillion euros in 2018. In addition, orphan neurodegenerative diseases...

The overall aim of SynapTau is to evaluate the contribution of microglia on tau-mediated synaptic loss in Alzheimers disease (AD), based on synaptosomal changes, which may help to develop therapeutic strategies against AD. Determining the impact of tau accumulation on synaptic loss is critical since it correlates with cognitive decline in AD...

Similar to prion diseases, more common fatal neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease are linked to the aggregation of different proteins (including Tau, Abeta and alpha- synuclein in the brain of affected patients. Furthermore most of the resulting brain lesions initially appear in specific brain areas and the...

With the NeutrAD ERC PoC project, we present the first disease-modifying Alzheimers Disease (AD) drugs that abrogate leukocyte-mediated neurotoxicity and represent a novel class of drugs in the treatment of AD.AD is a neurological disorder characterized by progressive deterioration of cognitive function and leads to death within 3-9 years after...