Interview Scheltens
With an aging population, dementia is destined to become the biggest disease entity in the Netherlands within twenty years. Philip Scheltens, Professor of Cognitive Neurology, is determined to stop that process. He searches for methods to make an early diagnosis of dementia more reliable, and hopes to develop treatment modalities to slow down or stop the progress of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
‘We have to speed up the process of bringing scientific developments to the patient. The Neuroscience Campus will help us to bridge research from the laboratory bench to the bedside. We want to make the leap from fundamental research to applied patient care easier, which is why the Neuroscience Campus initiative makes me enthusiastic.’
As director of the Alzheimer Center, professor Scheltens has worked hard to improve the care for patients with a neurodegenerative disease. Nearly ten years after he founded the Alzheimer Center in 2000, the project recently received a big stimulus with the donation of 4.5 million euros by the Health Care Insurers Innovation Fund. This money will be used to start an integrated outpatient clinic that combines possibilities for a swift diagnosis with state-of-the-art treatment.
Philip Scheltens is a neurologist by training, and now combines his clinical work with his scientific and management tasks as Director of the Alzheimer Center. After a PhD project on MRI imaging in Alzheimer’s disease, he continued his scientific efforts working on Alzheimer’s disease, vascular and frontotemporal dementia, structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging and biomarkers. As many studies are conducted using MRI, PET, EEG and MEG-imaging, Scheltens works closely together with researchers from other disciplines, such as the genetics department.
Still, he would like to further strengthen the interaction between the different scientists. Scheltens: ‘If we succeed in the optimisation of our collaboration, we can give the research on neurodegeneration an enormous boost. Especially the contacts with basic researchers working on cellular models of dementia can be strongly enhanced by the framework that is provided by the Neuroscience Campus. We, for example, already know a lot about the synapse in relation to neurodegenerative diseases. Now it is time to bring that knowledge to the patients.’
For the future, Philip Scheltens envisages a situation where all neuroscientists are housed in one building. That would create unique possibilities to bring neurological outpatient care physically together with cutting-edge research. ‘Of course we are not there yet, but we should try to get there in the end. It is my strong belief that many great ideas on therapeutic issues are perceived when doctors and scientists are brought together. People should be able to meet each other at the coffee machine.’
