Assistant Professor, Dr. Rebecca Miller and Professor Jerry Turnbull, awarded the EU-FET Open Grant HS-SEQ
Two members of the Copenhagen Center for Glycomics, Assistant Professor, Dr. Rebecca Miller and Professor, Prof. Jerry Turnbull have a radical vision of a science-enabled technology. A major challenge facing an ageing society is the burden of diseases with unmet medical needs such as neurological conditions including Parkinson’s (PD), Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and multiple sclerosis (MS) but also cancer, diabetes, wound healing and inflammatory diseases. Addressing these needs requires radical new thinking to create innovative, cost-effective and safe solutions – one emerging possibility is the next generation of heparin-based therapeutics. Heparins are members of the heparan sulfate (HS) family of highly sulfated polysaccharides that reside on the cell surface and extracellular matrix of all mammalian cell types. Understanding their functions has tremendous potential to unlock diverse biomedical applications. HS-SEQ will address this need by developing an integrated technology platform that can sequence heparin/HS to determine functional codes, and showcase its transformative potential by developing novel therapeutic strategies for Parkinson’s disease. This research will be conducted in collaboration with other scientists and researchers at Københavns Universitet, Universiteit Utrecht, Karolinska Institutet, Stichting Katholieke Universiteit, Freie Universität Berlin and the companies Waters, Opocrin (Italy), and IntelliHep (UK).
Dr. Miller and Dr. Turnbull will receive €684,000 in funding from the EU-FET Open Grant “HS-SEQ” which will run for 4 years from 1st September.
