Alicia Lundby has a received a Sapere Aude DFF-Starting Grant

Associate Professor Alicia Lundby has received a Sapere Aude Starting Grant of DKK 7 million from the Danish Council for Independent Research.

The title of Alicia’s project is ‘The Protein Interaction Landscape of Cardiac Diseases’.

”Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the developed world, and the medical challenges we are facing by them are increasing. The overarching aim of my research is to improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying cardiac disorders to lay the foundations for new clinical treatment strategies”, says Alicia and continues:

“To identify novel disease-related proteins my team will establish a methodological platform that allows us to measure cardiac protein-protein interaction networks for hundreds of proteins involved in cardiac disease. Proteins rarely operate as single entities but rather in larger protein complexes of functionally interdependent proteins. Therefore, delineating the protein network architecture of cardiac disease proteins represents a strategy to identify novel disease-associated proteins as well as key networks underlying cardiac diseases”, says Alicia.

About the primary aim of the project, Alicia says:

“We aim at creating a comprehensive knowledgebase of chamber- and cell-specific cardiac interaction networks, that interrelated with human population-based genetic data, will advance our knowledge on molecular relations in cardiac diseases, thereby opening doors for novel drug target identification and, in the long run, advancing clinical therapy”.

A total of 18 researchers receive a Sapere Aude DFF-Starting Grant. In total DKK 121 million has been awarded.