Michal Novák: Untangling a skein of Alzheimer disease’ s mystery

O tomto videu

Profesor Michal Novák išiel niekoľko desaťročí urputne proti prúdu, proti názoru väčšiny vedeckej obce, pri hľadaní príčin a možného spôsobu liečby Alzheimerovej choroby. Vo svojom pútavom rozprávaní nás prevedie svojim dlhoročným výskumom, od ťažkých začiatkov v čase socializmu, cez spoluprácou s držiteľmi Nobelevej ceny, až po najnovšie úspechy jeho tímu, ktorý vyvinul a v prvom kole klinických skúšok úspešne otestoval vakcínu proti Alzheimerovej chorobe.

About this speaker

Some of the greatest discoveries are born in quiet over a long period of time. When in 1989 Professor Michal Novák came up with the idea that so-called “tau proteins” may play an important role in the development and possibly also the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, this was basically unacceptable to the scientific community. In spite of that, Prof. Novák continued in his work, and this year, after nearly 30 years of slow and laborious research, his team has successfully passed phase one of clinical tests of the first active disease-modifying vaccine for Alzheimer’s disease in the world. In 1996 Prof. Novák founded the Institute of Neuroimmunology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences and later on also the Memory Foundation, the Slovak Alzheimer’s Association and the Slovak Society for Neuroscience. He spent ten years working at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in a team with three Nobel laureates. In 1999 he co-founded a biotech company called AXON Neuroscience.