The existing HIV medication Efavirenz may potentially also be effective for Alzheimer’s patients by lowering cholesterol in the brain. A clinical trial to test this led by Dr. Rik van der Kant, team leader at the Dementia Discovery, started in fall 2024 and now the first patient has completed treatment. Participants are still being recruited.
It has been known since 1936 that people diagnosed with schizophrenia are on average 1 centimeter shorter than people without that diagnosis. However, there have been few explanations of this relationship. Neuroscientist Cato Romero and his colleagues therefore investigated the link between schizophrenia and height in DNA datasets.
A study performed by PhD student Panthea Nemat of the Molecular Engrams team led by Dr. Priyanka Rao-Ruiz was recently published in a special issue on “Deciphering the memory engram” in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory in which they describe “Structural synaptic signatures of contextual memory retrieval-reactivated hippocampal engram cells”.
Scientists have developed a powerful new tool to pinpoint genes most likely causally linked to diseases, potentially accelerating drug development and advancing our understanding of disease biology.
In SUPERGLUE, PI’s at the VU (Mark Verheijen, Priyanka Rao-Ruiz, Natalia Goriounova, Harold MacGillavry) and AUMC (Rogier Min, Erik Bakker, Elga de Vries) will collaborate to investigate how subcellular compartments of the astrocyte control cognitive processing .
Alzheimer Nederland has awarded Jan van Weering a Major Award to investigate how neurotrophic signaling and mitochondrial function can be modulated to restore neuronal network function in neurons with tau pathology.
Matthijs Verhage and Iwan de Esch are organizing a symposium on January 31st, preceding the inauguration lecture of Dr. Ruud Toonen, professor of Neuroscience and Knowledge Utilization. The symposium is free and open to the public, targeting students, life science professionals, and individuals working in the medtech/biotech sector.
Amélie Freal (FGA) was awarded a Vidi grant from NWO for her project “Neurons in balance” to investigate the mechanisms controlling axon initial segment plasticity and how this regulates network activity homeostasis.
Danai Riga will join the FGA as a new team leader, after being awarded the Amsterdam UMC fellowship. The fellowship (750K) will support her in establishing her independent research line and expand her research group at the CNCR.
During a regular Monday morning lab meeting, Kim was surprised by a team from Alzheimer Nederland with the Alzheimer Nederland thesis prize 2024. She was applauded for the impressive manner in which she was capable to explain her high quality fundamental scientific work performed in the Scheper lab to a lay audience.
Max Koppers (FGA) was awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Union for his “RNA.ORG” project to investigate the molecular mechanisms that coordinate mRNA capture and translation in neurons.
On Saturday June 8, 2024, our teams successfully biked the European Million Dollar Bike Ride, a fundraising event to raise money for research into STXBP1-related disorders! Together they raised more than 12.000 euros.
Dr. van der Kant, group leader of the Dementia Discovery Group at the CNCR, has received a $500.000 award to study how lipids contribute to primary Tauopathies such as progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Dr. Scheper is internationally known for her studies on the role of proteostatic stress mechanisms in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative diseases. She now receives further recognition for her work with a professorship.
A collaboration between Marijn Schipper and Danielle Posthuma from CNCR-CTG and Camiel Mannens and Sten Linnarsson from the Karolinska Institute Sweden has led to the publication of the first map of chromatin accessibility and paired gene expression in the entire developing early embryonic human brain. The study is published May 1, 2024 in Nature.
This multidisciplinary work led by Marieke Meijer (Amsterdam UMC - FGA) describes how tomosyns limit synaptic strength at rest to equalize synaptic transmission during activity.
A collaboration between CNCR-FGA and University of Heidelberg shows that protein instability is the generalizable, primary cause. A new prediction tool outperforms all existing predictors. The paper is out now in Biological Psychiatry.
Neurotransmitter release is less synchronized in SYT1-associated disorder, according to a new study from the Cornelisse lab.
The STXBP1 team (FGA) joined 150 other researchers, healthcare professionals, industry representatives, and patient families and -advocates from all over the world for the first European meeting fully dedicated to STXBP1
Irune Guerra San Juan and Matthijs Verhage (FGA) became partners in an international consortium that designs and tests oligonucleotides to suppress poison exon insertion and restore full length Stathmin 2 expression in sporadic ALS
A core problem in several dementias is the inability to form new memories and gradual loss of old memories. Funded by a ZonMW open competition grant, the teams of Wiep Scheper (Amsterdam UMC Human Genetics/FGA), Priyanka Rao-Ruiz (VU MCN) and Michel van den Oever (VU MCN) will collaborate to obtain mechanistic insight into memory formation and persistence and how this is disturbed in dementia.
Van der Kant and the VU Medical Center receive funding for unravelling the associative link between exercise and lipid metabolism in prevention against Alzheimer.
The American National Institute of Health will fund new brain research of three CNCR researchers at VU Amsterdam through the so-called Brain Initiative programme. Brain research is desperately needed to better understand and treat brain diseases.
Rik van der Kant, Natalia Goriounova and Priyanka Rao-Ruiz, researchers at the Center for Neurogenomics & Cognitive Research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, have been awarded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with a Vidi grant worth 800,000 euros.
The global biopharmaceutical company UCB and an FGA team led by Ruud Toonen signed a 700k€ contract for joint research to develop new treatment strategies for genetic epilepsy syndromes.
The STXBP1 team of FGA obtained funding from the 2019 Million Dollar Bike Ride event, organized by the Orphan Disease Center in the US, for a high throughput screen to identify new therapeutic interventions for STXBP1 patients.
CNCR organized, together with new UMCA professor Hilgo Bruining, a colloquium at the Royal Academy bringing together world leaders to discuss neurodevelopmental disorders and science-based intervention for individual patients.
The Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science awards 19.6 million€ Gravitation grant to BRAINSCAPES consortium led by CNCR
Wijnand Geraerts, biologist by training, designed CNCR together with Menno Witter and Dorret Boomsma, promoting groundbreaking, multidisciplinary research and bringing scientists with different backgrounds together within CNCR.
Together with clinicians and researchers from Utrecht, Nijmegen and Twente, CNCR researchers Verhage, Cornelisse, Meijer (FGA) and Linkenkaer-Hansen (INF) received a €1,8M grant to improve personalized medicine for children with autism.
On Oct. 13, the 1st STXBP1 Patient Clinic Day will take place at VUmc in Amsterdam. The day is part of our studies on STXBP1-Encephalopathy (STXBP1-E) in a collaboration between FGA-CNCR, Clinical Genetics and VU spin-off company NBT Analytics.
The CNCR ‘Shisa’ team presents the characterization of a yet unknown glutamate receptor auxiliary subunit important for learning and memory. Their findings are currently available in the open access journal eLife.
At the annual meeting of the graduate school Neurosciences Amsterdam and Rotterdam (ONWAR) CNCR members Marieke van Ziel, Vincent Huson, Marinka Brouwer, Claudia Persoon and Mariana Raimundo Pinto de Matos won the Blitz presentation and oral presentation prices.
Four CNCR PhD students of the MCN department win a poster price at the annual Amsterdam Neuroscience meeting 2017.
For the first time in history, researchers have isolated the parts of the human genome that could explain the differences in how humans experience happiness.
The study analyzed the results from 2,748 studies, containing nearly 18,000 human traits, and is based on information from more than 14.5 million twin pairs. The study is published on May 18, in the leading journal Nature Genetics.
Psychiatric disorders – such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression – share genetic risk factors related to histone methylation (involved in DNA regulation) and immune function. This finding is a result of a large international study, including researchers from the VU/VUmc, in which they analyzed genetic data from over 60,000 individuals.
Aarts et al. propose using multilevel analysis as a solution to dependency between observations often seen in biological neuroscience data.
NWO Brain & Cognition awarded Anke Hammerschlag and Sabine Mous from the Complex Trait Genetics group for best integrated project on “An Integrative Theory of the Genetically Mediated Neural Substrates of ADHD‚. Watch their creative, musical presentation on youtube.
Victor Lamme delivered an entertaining and thought provoking keynote lecture on "The science and adventure of neuromarketing".
Danielle Posthuma (FALW & VUmc) and Huib Mansvelder (FALW) both receive a prestigious Vici grant (NWO). They are two out of eight VU and VUmc top-scientists to receive 1,5 million euro each for conducting research for the following five years.
Joint effort of CNCR researchers Ka Wan Li, Danielle Posthuma, Guus Smit and researchers from Leuven University (Belgium) shed new light on the role of the CYFIP1 gene. This gene has been linked to various neurological disorders, including intellectual disability, autism and schizophrenia.
Early October, the Human Brain Project – an EU Flagship initiative in which over 80 partners will work together - was launched. The initiative will realize a new "ICT-accelerated" vision for brain research and its applications. The VU-CNCR is one of the partners. Sabine Spijker, Guus Smit and Huib Mansvelder participate in this research.
CNCR collaborators, who took part in the Brain-Train project, attended the Neuroscience Brain Train Conference at the Riken Center for Life Science Technologies in Japan.
VU Neuroscience master students attended attended ‘Ion Channels in Health and Disease: a symposium to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Nobel Prize awarded to Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley’.
CNCR company page available now. Get connected and stay in touch with colleagues and alumni.
Christiaan Levelt is per 1 augustus 2013 benoemd als hoogleraar in de ‘Moleculaire en cellulaire mechanismen van corticale ontwikkeling en plasticiteit’. Hij is benoemd vanwege de Stichting het Vrije Universiteitsfonds. De leerstoel is ingebed bij de afdeling Moleculaire en Cellulaire Neurobiologie.
Andrea Goudriaan and colleagues show that sets of genes involved in specific glial function are associated with the risk to develop schizophrenia. They used genomewide association (GWA) data from 13,689 schizophrenic patients and 18,226 controls from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and the Swedish Schizophrenia sample.
Matthijs Verhage was honoured as a top researcher and awarded with a VU University Research Fellowship during the opening of the new Academic Year on 2 September 2013. He appointed Claudia Persoon as his Fellow student.
An international group of scientists including researchers of the CNCR have detected 22 independent genetic risk variants for schizophrenia. Thirteen of these have never been reported before. In addition, these novel results point to an enrichment of significant findings in genes that influence L-type calcium channels.
