Prof. Dr. med. Adriano Aguzzi

Overview

Adriano Aguzzi is professor and director of the Institute of Neuropathology at the University of Zurich. He has devoted the past 25 years to studying the immunological and molecular basis of prion pathogenesis, combining transgenetics with molecular and immunological techniques to clarify the pathogenesis of the disease, and to identify cells and molecules involved in prion neuroinvasion. He is the Founder and Director of the Swiss National Reference Center for Prion Diseases and has developed diagnostic and therapeutic methods in the field of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies. He serves on the editorial board of Science and is the Editor in Chief of the Swiss Medical Weekly; he also serves on the scientific advisory board of philanthropic foundations and biomedical companies. Among other honors, Prof. Aguzzi has won Ernst-Jung Prize, the Robert Koch Prize, the medal of the European Molecular Biology Organization, the NOMIS Distinguished Scientist Award and has held two ERC Advanced Grants.

Adriano Aguzzi and his laboratory have developed state - of- the -art tissue clarification technologies. These methods allow them to acquire microscopic images of whole rodent brains and reconstruct them in 3D with micrometer granularity. The platform they developed includes the devices to optically clarify and stain samples, further they have built two custom built light - sheet microscopes (mesoSPIM) to acquire these volumes rapidly. Recently, they managed to reconstruct the entire vascular tree of the mouse brain with specific labeling of various vascular segments. These methods are ideally suited to characterize the vascular phenotypes in the context of stroke and neurodegenerative diseases.

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