The Research Council of Finland /Academy of Finland Scientific Council for Biosciences, Health and the Environment has granted generous funding to two research projects at Turku Bioscience:

• Half a million euros to Research Director Eleanor Coffey for the project Exploring the Blood Brain Connection in Parkinson’s Disease

Short summary of the project: Parkinson’s disease is a multi-system disorder affecting around 10 million people worldwide. Coffey and her team at Turku Bioscience will investigate whether exosomes deliver inflammatory signals and pathogens to the brain using new technology that allows separation of exosomes based on light scattering and fluorescence. This project is enabled by software developed by the Coffey lab with the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s research. The results will promise insight on the trajectory of inflammatory and pathogen signals from blood to brain in Parkinson’s and mechanistic understanding of infectious and inflammatory mechanisms.

• 791 327 euros to Postdoctoral Researcher Santosh Lamichhane for the project The Gut microbiome Lipid connection and its early life clinical implications (GutLipid)

Short summary of the project: The GutLipid project aims to explore how lipids produced by gut microbes affect early-life health. We will catalogue lipids from cultured human gut microbes and create a shared database. The project will study how these lipids influence the progression of islet autoimmune disease progression in early life, providing new insights into the gut microbiome’s impact on health.