The Belgian scientist Bart De Strooper is among the four winners of the Brain Prize. Each year the Danish Lundbeck Foundation awards this prize to people that have delivered a major contribution to brain research.
© Lundbeck Foundation
Together with his compatriot Christine Van Broeckhoven, Bart De Strooper is among the world's best in the field of dementia research. He is head of the Center for Brain & Disease Research of the Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) and KU Leuven. Furthermore, he has been the director of the UK Dementia Research Institute in London since 2016.
Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia. Around 10 million people are affected by this incurable disease in Europe alone. Alzheimer is caused by the accumulation of protein in the brain. This causes nerve cells to die off, which in turn leads to memory loss. For years, Bart De Strooper has been studying how this happens and hopes, in time, to develop a medicine that can cure Alzheimer's, in collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry.
The Brain Prize involves a sum of 1 million euros. Bart De Strooper will share this with three other Alzheimer researchers: Michel Goedert from Luxembourg (Cambridge University), Christian Haass from Germany (Munich University) and John Hardy from Great Britain (University College London).
