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Mathias Jucker receives international award

Professor Mathias Jucker from the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research and the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases shares the International Prize for Translational Neuroscience of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation with Maiken Nedergaard from Denmark and Roy Weller from Great Britain. The prize is awarded for special achievements in basic neurological science and is endowed with €60,000.

About 1.5 million people in Germany suffer from Alzheimer's dementia. The disease is caused by beta-amyloid deposits in the brain. As the removal of these beta-amyloid-deposits becomes more and more difficult with increasing age, a growing number of nerve cells die. The laureates have discovered how waste products are removed from the brain and how the brain fluids produced during this clearing process can be used for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer's dementia.

"Thanks to Nedergaard and Weller, we know how the brain, which does not have a classic lymphatic system, removes beta-amyloid and other waste products," says Professor Herbert Jäckle, Chairman of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation and Director Emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen. "Jucker has demonstrated that early detection of the disease in brain fluids and blood is possible. These are groundbreaking discoveries. The prizewinning work is therefore an excellent example of translational research. Especially in the case of complex brain diseases, we need impetus from basic research," Jäckle continues.

Jucker first showed in mice and later in patients that brain fluids contain fragments of beta-amyloid plaques and nerve cell debris. These fragments can be used as biomarker for neurodegeneration and early detection of Alzheimer's dementia. Such a test is of high clinical importance because previous therapies have probably failed because the disease was too advanced by the time of diagnosis. A successful treatment will probably have to start much earlier

"Since the Medical Faculty of the University of Tübingen is committed to translational and clinical research, we are very pleased that Professor Jucker receives this prestigious award," says Professor Bernd Pichler, Dean of the Medical Faculty. "Basic research must be purposeless, but it should also have the goal of producing new and better diagnosis and treatment options. This is the claim we set ourselves in Tübingen”.

 

Professor Dr. Mathias Jucker studied neuroscience in Zürich and received his PhD. from the ETH Zürich in 1988. After several years at the National Institute on Aging, he moved to the University of Basel. Since 2003, he has been Professor of Cell Biology of Neurological Diseases in Tübingen and Director at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research (HIH). He also heads a research group at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases (DZNE) and coordinates the "Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer Network (DIAN)" in Germany. In 2018 he was a visiting professor at Stanford University.

 

Copyright: Ingo Rappers / HIH

 

Link to the Press Release (in German only)

 

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