SEK 40M for research on Alzheimer’s, ALS and Parkinson’s at Umeå University and SLU

More than 100,000 Swedes are afflicted and over 10,000 people fall ill every year by neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson's disease.

What is lacking for these neurodegenerative diseases today are treatments and medicines that prevent, cure or affect the disease processes. Effective treatment requires that patients receive an early diagnosis, so that proper treatment is implemented before too large an amount of the body's nerve cells have been broken down and can no longer be treated.

"Today, we often have many problems in getting the correct diagnosis. For Parkinson's disease, studies show that every fourth patient receives an incorrect diagnosis" says Professor Lars Forsgren.

The research project titled "Metabolic markers of neurodegenerative diseases" is interdisciplinary. New knowledge will be developed by medicine, biology and chemistry combined with so-called metabolomics.

With support from the Wallenberg Consortium North (WCN) seven years ago, Umeå was a national node for the development of metabolomics. Today, Umeå researchers are on the full-scale international research front.

"This grant will be of great importance for the further method development in metabolomics analysis here in Umeå, and will certainly benefit more projects where metabolomics analysis is central at both Umeå University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU)," says Thomas Moritz, a professor at SLU in Umeå and Director of the metabolomics laboratory.

"The project will not only be relevant to various neurological diseases. The development of metabolomics research will also be vital for research on diseases such as asthma and allergies, prostate cancer and infectious diseases," explains Göran Sandberg.

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