The development of treatments that will help patients with structural damage to the CNS is one of the great remaining unmet needs in medicine.  These disorders represent a large proportion of the severely disabled people in Western societies (Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and dementias, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, glaucoma). All these conditions have damage to axons as a common feature.

To this end the progamme (AXREGEN) brings together many of the prominent laboratories in Europe working on different aspects of axonal damage and repair. Each student, therefore, will have his/her own training schedule, encompassing a wide variety of technical and theoretical approaches, yet have a common interest in the problems of axonal degeneration and repair. In addition, there will be a strong emphasis on the commercial exploitation and development of potential new therapies. These, together with a series of workshops, seminars and online tutorials, will foster a sense of collegiality amongst the students themselves, as well as direct knowledge of the work going on in the laboratories of the consortium.

The project is funded by a grant of 4.6M euros over 4 years (2008-2012) from the Marie Curie training progamme. Each of the 10 Universities involved has two PhD students allocated to it.  The two industrial partners each have one post-doctoral (PhD) worker. Each student must work in a lab in a country not his/her own.  The majority (but not all) of these students are from EU countries.

The students meet each other at the workshops (held regularly throughout the project’s lifespan), during exchange visits to the partner laboratories, and by email and this website, which offers the ability for them to interact and exchange information between them and between their host laboratories.

The research topics themselves range from studies on the molecular biology of gene expression during axonal damage and regeneration, through cellular approaches for rescuing axons, artificial systems for growing and studying axons in vitro, the use of stem cells as regenerative procedures, advanced imaging techniques for assessing axonal integrity, studies on ways to alter axonal plasticity, pharmacological approaches to preventing or restoring axonal damage, new surgical and experimental methods for studying axonal structure and function,  tests of recovery (including both physiological and behavioural techniques) and the contribution of axonal malfunction to animal models of specific diseases. Students will also be taught the avenues available for commercial exploitation of experimental findings.  Much of the wide expanse of contemporary neuroscience and associated disciplines is represented in this spectrum.

The participating institutions are:

Brain Repair Centre, University of Cambridge, UK (coordinator)
Wallenberg Neuroscience Center, Lund, Sweden
Developmental Biology Institute of Marseille-Luminy , France
Laboratory of Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology, The Nencki Institute, Poland
Institute of Neurosciences, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,  Spain
Rita Levi Montalcini Center for Brain Repair, Turin University, Italy
Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Laboratorio di Neuroplasticità, Fondazione Santa Lucia, Italy
Institute of Experimental Medicine, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
Workgroup Neuroregeneration, The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, The Netherlands
Miltenyi Biotec GmbH, Cologne, Germany
Pharmaxon, France

News: September 2009.  There is a PhD studentship available on this programme.  See next page