Autoimmune encephalitis: ItsME Foundation funds Harschnitz Group
07 May 2024
Autoimmune encephalitis: ItsME Foundation funds Harschnitz Group
The Harschnitz Group has been awarded a grant from the ItsME Foundation to develop a human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC)-derived brainstem model to understand brainstem encephalitis. The ItsME Foundation was founded in 2019 by Jur Deitmers and has its base in The Netherlands, with the goal to fight Meningitis and Encephalitis.
Autoimmune encephalitis (AIE) is a group of disorders where the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy brain cells, causing inflammation. Symptoms range from memory loss to seizures and psychiatric issues.
The study will leverage hPSC technology to create disease-relevant cells of the central nervous system, in particular the brainstem, which are less understood in AIE pathology. This approach, utilising advanced stem cell techniques, promises insights into AIE pathogenesis and potential therapeutic avenues, reducing reliance on animal models.
“Our goal is to develop a novel model of the human brainstem, that can be leveraged to study both the normal development of the brain as well as pathology affecting the brainstem” – Oliver Harschnitz explains – “At HT, we will work closely with the National Facility for Genomics, which will help us to profile at a single-cell resolution the fidelity of our model. This project is important to our goals to further understand the molecular mechanisms underlying pathology of the human brainstem. We will do this using multiple single-cell profiling methods that will help us to dissect the cell-type vulnerability within the brainstem for specific autoantibodies.“
Five years since its inception, Human Technopole is now a dynamic institute where researchers from around the world have laid the foundations for unravelling the fundamental mechanisms of life across multiple biological scales – molecules, cells, tissues, organs, organisms, populations – in space and time.
The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina has elected the Dresden and Italian cell biologist Marino Zerial as one of its members. Currently Director of Human Technopole, he is also one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics (MPI-CBG).
For the first time in nearly 20 years, Italy wins a Fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP): our Karthik Ramanadane, Postdoc in the Coscia Group (Structural Biology), will pursue a challenging project on the molecular mechanisms of the thyroid at Human Technopole.
Two research projects from Human Technopole have won the Fondazione Telethon and Cariplo grant to uncover the genetic and molecular mechanisms of acute myeloid leukemia and congenital adrenal hyperplasia. The projects, led by Alice Giustacchini (Group Leader of Genomics) and Emanuele Villa and Nicolò Caporale (Testa Group, Neurogenomics), have been respectively funded with €230,000 and €250,000.
Two Human Technopole researchers have been awarded the Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships for early career researchers: Dr. Carlos Jiménez and Dr. Albert Navarro Gallinad. Dr. Navarro Gallinad’s research project, presented today on National Women’s Health Day, will investigate the environmental risks faced by pregnant women by analysing almost 1,000,000 births in Lombardy over the last twelve years. Dr. Jiménez will study how the spatial arrangement of nuclear proteins contributes to optimal cell functioning.
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