Dr Janko Kajtez awarded a Lundbeck Foundation grant
Dr Janko Kajtez, a postdoc at Human Neural Development group led by Associate Professor Agnete Kirkeby at the Copenhagen node of the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Stem Cell Medicine (reNEW), has received a Lundbeck Foundation Experiment grant for his research on the blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier (BCB). The grant, worth DKK 2 million, will support his work together with a research assistant, over two years.
In the first stage, the evaluation procedure for the Lundbeck Foundation Experiment grant is anonymised, with the focus being on the research ideas which have great potential to transform our understanding of an important research field. The applicant's suitability to execute the project is next assessed.
With this project, Janko aims to create a human BCB model in a dish using human pluripotent stem cells to study drug permeability across the barrier. The goal is to use this model to discover new drug delivery methods to the brain and investigate the role of BCB in infectious and neurodegenerative diseases. This innovative approach to brain research fills a gap in existing studies.
“We are filling in kind of a niche when it comes to the modelling of this barrier, because on one hand, there's been a lot of animal models. Researchers would extract these types of cells from animals and use them as a functional model in a dish. However, there are clear differences between animals and humans, and therefore human models are needed. Furthermore, a lot of research has been focusing on recreating the complexity of this tissue in three dimensions, but this is not very reproducible. We are therefore trying to create a much simpler human model that reproducibly replicates the most essential aspect and function of the barrier,” said Dr Janko Kajtez.
Initially training as a physicist and mathematician, Janko shifted to biology during his Master and PhD studies. Over his career, he has used multi-disciplinary approaches to improve stem cell models, particularly for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease.
“Now I'm expanding to other brain regions and other tissues, and my interest is to leverage stem cell differentiation in combination with engineering approaches to create more complex systems relevant to disease modeling or drug screening purposes,” said Dr Kajtez.
The Lundbeck Foundation grant's selection of Janko’s project highlights the pharmaceutical industry's struggle with brain therapies as more than 90% of novel neurotherapeutics fail at clinical trial.
Furthermore, the selection highlights the importance of studying BCB. While an important gateway to the brain, BCB remains understudied and outshone by other brain regions and another barrier in the brain called blood-brain-barrier.
With a strong translational component, the human BCB model proposed in the project could help improve the diagnostics of brain disorders as well as mitigate the risk, lower the cost, and increase the approval rates of neurotherapeutics in the future.