Neville VassalloNeville Vassallo, a senior academic at the University’s Department of Physiology and Biochemistry, gave a keynote lecture at the Centre for Neuropathology of Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, as part of a seminar series organised by the Munich Excellence Cluster for Systems Neurology (Synergy).
Vassallo’s talk was entitled ‘Amyloid-membrane interactions: a novel target for therapeutic intervention in neurodegenerative disease’. He put forward a novel concept in the design and testing of new drugs to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. He suggested that researchers should endeavour to develop compounds that block a key molecular interaction between toxic aggregates that accumulate in the brains of patients and mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of a brain cell.
Vassallo summarised recent work by his laboratory group at the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry that strongly suggested that naturally-occurring compounds called polyphenols, which are plant-derived metabolites found commonly in the human diet, may help stave off neurodegenerative disorders by such mechanisms.
He added that in research work currently being conducted at the University in collaboration with Ruben Cauchi from the same department, select polyphenols are being tested in fly models of neurodegenerative diseases.
The talk has laid the foundation for further collaborative research and student exchanges between the University of Malta and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. It will also promote the University of Malta as a centre of research excellence on neurodegenerative diseases.
The Synergy cluster is a collaborative initiative of top neuroscience research institutions in Germany. These include the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, the Technical University of Munich, the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases, three Max Planck Institutes and the Helmholtz Centre Munich. The initiative is based on the outstanding expertise that these institutions have in a broad range of neurological diseases. The aim of Synergy is to promote integrative research and eventually new therapeutic options.
www.synergy-munich.de/news/events/vassallo/index.html