Research Projects

Cytokines, such as TNF-, hold immense significance as protein biomarkers, pivotal for diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic management across various clinical disorders like Alzheimers disease, sepsis, and cancer. Nonetheless, prevailing techniques like enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) prove to be...

Cytokines, such as TNF-, hold immense significance as protein biomarkers, pivotal for diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic management across various clinical disorders like Alzheimers disease, sepsis, and cancer. Nonetheless, prevailing techniques like enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) prove to be...

Joint Action on Dementia 2015-2018. The Joint Action will focus on two phases on work: approximately 12 months on developing a consensus on the best evidence of effective action in 4 key areas (diagnosis and post-diagnostic support; crisis and care coordination; quality of care in residential care settings; and dementia-friendly communities); and...

Protein phosphorylation is a process that activates biological and cellular pathways. This process is carried out by enzymes called protein kinases that add phosphates to proteins. Protein kinases are crucial drug targets involved in the onset and progression of human diseases such as cancer and Alzheimers disease. Growing evidence suggests that...

The connectome is a map of all neural connections in the brain that can provide information about the brain’s (re)wiring in neurological diseases, injuries, or drugs responses. The use of connectomes in clinical practice has enormous potential to improve treatment efficacy, enhance patient stratification, disease characterization, and ultimately...

Every year, Alzheimer's disease (AD) affects about 800,000 new patients in Europe and directly causes 50% of dependency of aged persons. Currently there is no test to diagnose this disease. There is a great need to improve outcomes for patients with lung cancer which causes between 15-28% of all cancer deaths in Europe. Chemical and structural...

Dysregulated interactions between biomolecules can lead to changes in cell signalling and gene expression, both common drivers of human disease. A detailed understanding of these interactions is vital for drug development, often targeting such interactions for therapeutic effects. In this project, I aim to develop an optical microscopy tool to...

The long-term goal of this project is to understand how neuronal assemblies exchange information (functional or neuronal communication), and how variability in neuronal communication explains variability in behavioural performance, both in the intact and injured brain. Communication involves temporal interactions between neuronal assemblies either...

Dementia is a major healthcare challenge worldwide due to its high incidence and its strong impact on the life quality of patients and on society as a whole. Development of treatments for the mitigation of memory impairment in patients with dementia has proven very challenging, partly due to our limited understanding of the underlying mechanisms of...

Light-addressable potentiometric sensors (LAPS) have great potential as a tool for functional electrochemical imaging of the attachment area of cells, providing information such as ion concentration, extracellular potentials and ion channel activity. The technique is particularly attractive for analysing cell responses of cells with planar...

Stroke is a leading and increasingly important cause of death and disability in the EU. Yet, we have only few effective treatments and an unsatisfactory understanding of human stroke pathophysiology. Current diagnostic algorithms fail to capture pathophysiological mechanisms in daily clinical practice, hindering the allocation of patients to...

Neurodegenerative dementias are characterised by a continuous loss of neurons that are not replaced. Why neurons die in disease-affected brain regions is still a matter of discussion. This project explores a key common pathological mechanism across the three major neurodegenerative diseases leading to dementia: Alzheimer’s disease, Frontotemporal...