Mathias Jucker
Swiss neuroscientist (b. 1961)
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Through Switzerland, Brain and Ageing
Education and career
Jucker received his doctoral degree (1988) in Natural Sciences from ETH Zürich, after which he began his research on aging in the brain at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) in Baltimore, United States, and then at the University of Basel (Switzerland). In 2003 he became Full Professor of Cell Biology of Neurological Diseases at the University of Tübingen. In 2009 he was named a group leader at the DZNE in Tübingen, and in 2012 he became the founding coordinator of the Dominantly Inherited Alzheimer's Disease Network (DIAN) in Germany.
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Research
Prion-like properties of disease-causing proteins
Jucker's research has focused on understanding how certain proteins cause disease by adopting abnormal 3-dimensional shapes (conformations) in the nervous system. In collaboration with Lary Walker, Jucker was the first to show in experimental mice that the accumulation of abnormally folded proteins in Alzheimer's disease occurs by a prion-like mechanism. The prion concept has since been expanded to include several other proteins, including tau and α-synuclein, which similarly misfold and aggregate in a class of diseases known as proteopathies.
Biomarkers of Alzheimer's disease
Jucker also has contributed to the development and validation of biomarkers for Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. He found that changes in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers in mouse models closely resemble the changes in humans with Alzheimer's disease, and he and his colleagues showed that a protein in neurons known as neurofilament light chain can serve as a biomarker in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid that can be used to determine the progression of Alzheimer's Disease.
Awards
Jucker has received the Research Prize of the Swiss Alzheimer Association (2001), the Zenith Fellows Award of the Alzheimer's Association (2006), the Soriano Lectureship of the American Neurological Association (2010), the Hamburg Science Award for dementia research from the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg (2013), the Metlife Foundation Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease (2014), and the International Prize for Translational Neuroscience of the Gertrud Reemtsma Foundation (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft) (2020).