The main speaker will be Dr. Robert Thorne from Denali Therapeutics which is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the development of therapeutics for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Its proprietary drug delivery platform technologies include an antibody transport vehicle and an enzyme transport vehicle designed to deliver large molecules across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). Its pipeline products are intended for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson’s disease, multiple system atrophy, lysosomal storage disorder MPS II, neurodegeneration and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

The talk will be followed up by short presentations from our local BBB labs in Aarhus and Aalborg university.

Program:

13.30-14.20: Leveraging physiology & engineering for drug delivery to the brain: taking antibodies, enzymes and other proteins to the final frontier. Robert Thorne, Denali Therapeutics.

14.20-14.35: Acid/base transport at the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier, Helle Damkier, Aarhus University

14.35-14.50: Coffee

14.45-15.15: Viral gene therapy at the blood-brain barrier as a strategy to enable protein secretion from endothelium to the brain, Bartosz Laczek, Aalborg University

15.15-15.30: Annette: The brain-specific AAV-BR1 vector alleviates neurological symptoms in a mouse model of Niemann-Pick type C2 disease, Annette Burkhart Thomsen, Aalborg University

15.30-15.45: Significant change in biometal distribution in brains of Alzheimer´s Disease (TgSwDI) mice, Maj Schneider Thomsen, Aalborg University