Rosa Rademakers is awarded prestigious prize for dementia research
Last night in Los Angeles, the Breakthrough Prizes have been awarded in the presence of Hollywood’s rich and famous. Rosa Rademakers, scientific director at the VIB-UAntwerp Center for Molecular Neurology, was awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for her discovery of the C9orf72 expansion and its link to frontotemporal dementia. With the Breakthrough Prize, Rademakers enters a select group of international top scientists.
Following in the footsteps of Adil and Bilal, Erik Van Looy and Matthias Schoenaerts, we have a new local star in the Hollywood firmament, but surprisingly, this time it is not an actor or a director. Professor Rosa Rademakers (Faculty of Pharmaceutical, Biomedical and Veterinary Sciences) appeared on the red carpet in Los Angeles on Saturday night to receive a Breakthrough Prize for a discovery she made in 2011. At that time, she and her team identified a specific genetic defect that is a major cause of not one but two conditions: frontotemporal dementia and ALS.
I am indebted to my colleagues, collaborators and of course: the patients. They are the end goal but also the means to our research.
‘I am deeply honored to receive the Breakthrough prize and am grateful for the visibility this generates for the plight of people with frontotemporal dementia and their loved ones,’ Rosa Rademakers reacts. ‘I am indebted to my colleagues past and present, in the US and Belgium, the many, many scientific and clinical collaborators that make our large genetic studies possible, and of course: the patients. They are the end goal but also the means to our research.’
What is frontotemporal dementia?
This form of dementia is less well known than, for example, Alzheimer’s disease, but has just as great an impact on patients and their families. Rosa Rademakers has dedicated her life’s work to finding out as much as possible about this rare brain disease.
An unusual prize
Yesterday, Rademakers shared the stage with Bryan Traynor, an ALS researcher and neurologist in the US, whose team discovered the repeat on chromosome 9 during the same period. Together, they will receive the $3 million prize.
In terms of prize money, the Breakthrough Prizes are the biggest awards for scientists. The glitz and glamour of the ceremony (including guests like Ann Hathaway, Christina Aguilera and Robert Downey Jr.) are a deliberate choice by the founders, including tech billionaires such as Sergey Brin (Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). They want to celebrate scientists as heroes and thereby inspire the next generation.
A puzzle for advanced minds
Since her groundbreaking discovery in 2011, Rademakers has not been idle. In 2019, she returned to Belgium and became scientific director at the VIB-UAntwerp Centre for Molecular Neurology. Just earlier this year, her team published the discovery of a new genetic marker for a rare subtype of frontotemporal dementia.