Research Projects

The overall objective of Home4Dem is to address the challenge of dementia care that is a major burden for industrialised societies, through the large-scale deployment in the market of an innovative ICT platform to enable people with dementia to live at home independently and to maintain an active social life, thus improving their quality of life...

How can we understand one another? Our everyday conversations appear to revolve around our linguistic abilities. But creating mutual understanding involves more than formulating grammatically correct sentences. Recently, cognitive science has shown that mutual understanding relies on shared knowledge and beliefs, conceptual knowledge that is...

The RECAGE project will tackle one of the most challenging problem arising during the clinical course of dementia: the so-called Behavioural and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia (BPSD). The current state-of-the-art of the treatment of these symptoms is still unsatisfactory and there are many unmet needs in this area. The major objective of the...

I propose to test how hyper-anxiety in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients is caused by neurodegeneration in the amygdala, our 'center of fear', by comparing with a unique group of Urbach Wiethe disease (UWD) patients with bilateral neurodegeneration of the amygdala (BLA) for which I also construct an animal model. UWD is caused by a very rare...

There are many efforts at European level to improve our ability to monitor health and to prevent, detect, treat and manage disease so that active and healthy ageing can be promoted. In this project, breakthrough research and radical innovation on new services for integrated care is achieved by means of an efficient and cost-effective service...

The frequency of Alzheimer's disease (AD) will dramatically increase in the ageing western society during the next decades. Currently, about 18 million people suffer worldwide from AD. Since no cure is available, this devastating disorder represents one of the most challenging socio-economical problems of our future. As onset and progression of AD...

The objectives of the project are to identify and evaluate potassium channels of the KCa3.1/KCa2.X type as novel drug targets for the prevention and treatment of cerebrovascular ischemia and neuroprotection in metabolic disease and neurodegenerative disorders associated with vascular pathologies, as a new pathophysiological concept and treatment...

The microtubule-associated protein tau is the most commonly misfolded protein in neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer’s disease and other related tauopathies. These neurological illnesses are hypothesized to share a common mechanism of disease progression, where pathogenic aggregates or ‘seeds’ of the tau protein function as templates...

Age represents by far the largest risk factor for dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia. However, not every person will develop dementia during aging, indicating that age-related processes may not inescapably lead to dementia. The elucidation of the fundamental processes occurring in aging will likely offer new options to prevent or...

Project RISK-UPDATE will support the reintegration of Dr Talya Miron-Shatz, after four years spent as post-doctoral research collaborator with Nobel Laureate Prof. Daniel Kahneman at Princeton University, in the USA. Dr Miron-Shatz’s new host institution is Ono Academic College, Israel, which has agreed to set up a new research centre to facilitate...

Tauopathies are a group of neurodegenerative diseases, the most common of them being Alzheimer’s disease, which are associated with the aggregation of protein Tau in the brain. Despite major research efforts world-wide, the mechanism of Tau aggregation and its pathogenesis giving rise to such neurodegenerative diseases is not yet understood...

The majority of the risk to develop Alzheimer's disease is influenced by genetic factors. We previously found that carrying a genetic mutation in the SORL1 gene can lead to a greatly increased chance of developing Alzheimer's Disease. SORL1 is involved in the production and processing of Alzheimer proteins that accumulate in the brain. e have...