Professor Anders Björklund
Senior Professor of Histology, Wallenberg Neuroscience Center, Lund University, Sweden
www.wnc.lu.se

Anders Björklund is a Swedish neuroscientist and pioneer in the study of cell- and gene-based reparative and neuroprotective mechanisms in the brain. He has spent his academic career at Lund University in Sweden, as professor since 1983 and as senior professor at the Wallenberg Neuroscience Center since his formal retirement in 2012. In the 1980s his team at Lund University pioneered the development of stem cell-based therapies for brain repair, and his group has for more than four decades played a leading role in the development and use of dopamine cell replacement in patients with Parkinson's disease. Björklund was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1989, and Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, in 2011. (Wikipdia)

Abstract

Cell therapy for Parkinson´s disease is based on the idea that stem cell-derived dopamine neuron progenitors can be used to replace the nigral dopamine neurons that have been lost to the disease. In this lecture I will summarize the state of the art in this field, how we got to here, and how the dopamine cell replacement approach can be further developed to reach the goal of fully functional circuitry repair.

Programme

About the Lectures of Excellence: "Pioneers in Neurosciences“

Every year, excellent scientists who have made significant discoveries in the field of life sciences are invited to Rostock to provide insights into their research. These include, above all, Nobel Prize winners, Robert Koch and Leibniz Prize winners or winners of other excellent awards. The lectures are aimed at a scientific plenum consisting of (young) scientists and clinicians.

On March 20, 2019, Prof. Dr. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard from the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen successfully presented the Lecture of Excellence with a lecture on the topic: “The stripes of the zebrafish: How and why does beauty arise in animals?”. More than 100 guests from the public and academia attended the event and took advantage of the subsequent opportunity for a direct exchange with the Nobel Prize winner.

After a break due to corona, the Robert Koch Prize winner Prof. Dr. Hans R. Schöler started the lecture series again on August 24, 2022 with the topic “The importance of pluripotent stem cells and organoids for biomedical research and the development of drugs”. Prof. Schöler is a retired professor at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine in Münster.