As part of the faculty’s work on investing in young researchers at the Faculty of Medicine, they decided last year to set up a careers centre and a number of so-called creative environments. The assessment committee has compiled a top ten list, from which the five best were picked yesterday. The creative environments are designed to stimulate collaboration between clinicians, health care scientists  and basic scientists. A creative environment consists of four to six researchers put together to tackle a common issue.

The central nervous system’s mop-up crew, microglia, play an important role in protecting the brain against disease and injury. A MultiPark research group has now developed a method that makes it possible to follow the behaviour of these support cells at close quarters. Increased knowledge about the specific role of microglia could open the door to new research avenues on several different neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease and stroke.

The field of cell therapy, which aims to form new cells in the body in order to cure disease, has taken another important step in the development towards new treatments. A new report from researchers at Lund University in Sweden shows that it is possible to re-programme other cells to become nerve cells, directly in the brain.