Associate Professor Alicia Lundby receives prestigious Sapere Aude Grant

Alicia Lundby (Group leader and Associate Professor at Department of Biomedical Sciences & affiliated Associate Professor at Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research) has been awarded a Sapere Aude grant of 7.030.542 DKK for her research in protein networks involved in cardiac diseases.

More on the project (text from the Danish Council of Independent Research website): 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.

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. 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.