Grant: Cancer patients donate living brain cells to researchers
Backed by a three and half million kroner grant from the Lundbeck Foundation, Professor Marco Capogna from Aarhus University is working with researchers from the United States to learn more about the many different types of nerve cells that make the human brain work. This knowledge may turn out to be important in areas such as the development of medicines against dementia and rehabilitation after a blood clot in the brain.
Over the course of a few months, leftover cells from brain tumour operations performed by the neurosurgeons at Aarhus University Hospital will play a key role in the mapping of the nerve cells in the human cerebral cortex.
This is when Professor Marco Capogna from the Department of Biomedicine and his American colleague, neuro researcher Jonathan Ting from the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle in the United States, will begin the project for which they have just received DKK 3.5 million from the Lundbeck Foundation.
The funded research will provide new knowledge about the nerve cells in the human cerebral cortex via studies of surgically resected living human cortical tissue that is surplus to diagnostic requirement from brain tumour patients. And while the clinical team led by Clinical Professor and Chair Jens Christian Hedemann Sørensen from Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital will perform the brain neurosurgery, Marco Capogna and his team will investigate the nerve cells in the cerebral cortex – the part of our brain that, among other things, plays a central role in learning and our ability to think abstractly, and which is particularly challenged when a person is affected by e.g. dementia or a blood clot.
Contact
Professor Marco Capogna
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine and DANDRITE
Tel.: (+45) 8716 8407
Email: marco.capogna@biomed.au.dk
This news article is based on press material from the Lundbeck Foundation.