f you are to have any hope of understanding the brain’s mechanisms and disorders, you need clever minds, lots of money and uncompromising research year in and year out.

And it was the ambition to create a neuroscience environment of this kind – focusing on attracting exceptional international research profiles – that prompted the Lundbeck Foundation and Aarhus University (AU) in 2013 to establish DANDRITE (Danish Research Institute of Translational Neuroscience), as the Danish node of the Nordic EMBL Partnership for molecular medicine. 

The neuroscience centre is part of AU, and in the period between 2013 and 2023 the Lundbeck Foundation granted a total of DKK 120 million for DANDRITE to spend on research.

The Lundbeck Foundation is now awarding the centre a further research grant.

This grant, which was recently approved by the Foundation’s board of directors, is worth DKK 75 million. The funds will be paid out over the course of the years up to 2028 and will primarily be spent on recruitment of five new DANDRITE group leaders to head individual neuroscience research programmes.

‘We consider DANDRITE a strong programme for strengthening the international profile and standard of Danish research into the brain and its disorders,’ says Jan Egebjerg, Director of Research at the Lundbeck Foundation.

‘With its funding for DANDRITE, the Lundbeck Foundation wishes to stimulate talent development and strengthen the Danish neuroscience community by recruiting talented scientists from abroad and giving them the opportunity to develop their extremely ambitious research projects in Denmark.’

‘The Lundbeck Foundation grant will ensure that we’ll continue to have opportunities to develop new methods and introduce them to Danish neuroscience – with recruitment of new group leaders as the key approach,’ says Professor Poul Nissen, Director of DANDRITE.

And Professor Nissen points out another benefit of the grant: ‘it will give DANDRITE opportunities to promote talent development at all levels of the field of neuroscience’. 

A BROAD SPECTRUM

*DANDRITE is located at Aarhus University. The centre is the Danish node of Nordic EMBL Partnership for molecular medicine. (EMBL stands for European Molecular Biology Laboratory. For further information about the Nordic EMBL Partnership, please visit https://projects.au.dk/nordic-embl-partnership/)

*DANDRITE has recruited five new research groups. Together with the three existing groups at Aarhus University, they focus on a broad range of neuroscience topics and challenges.

*Many of their studies deal with biochemical mechanisms underlying psychiatric diseases or dementia disorders such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

This article was originally published on the DANDRITE website.