As part of the implementation of the new research strategy of the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), Prof. Rejko Krüger joins the LIH as the Director of Transversal Translational Medicine, while carrying on with his work at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg and at the Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg (CHL).
Patient-centered biomedical research
With its new strategy, the LIH plans to head more towards translational research. The institute wishes to place patients and the population as a whole at the centre of its activities, and to contribute to personalised medicine by developing new methods for diagnostics as well as innovative therapies. In this framework, Prof. Krüger has just assumed a new role within the LIH in order to implement and supervise translational research programmes involving several partners from different fields.
Coordinating transversal research programmes
These programmes will be modelled on the National Centre of Excellence in Research on Parkinson’s Disease (NCER-PD). This translational research programme was launched in 2015 with the support of the National Research Fund (FNR) and is coordinated by Prof. Krüger. “If we want to see the results obtained in the labs become useful to the patients, we need to have all the stakeholders at the table: researchers, clinicians, patients’ associations, heath authorities and industrial partners,” explains Prof. Krüger. “The experience acquired with NCER-PD, a successful multilateral collaboration, will play a key role. NCER-PD will serve as an example to build other translational research programmes focusing on topics such as cancer or immune diseases, involving large patients’ cohorts and integrating digital health tools.”
Strengthening our links to develop a joint strategy
Rejko Krüger has been a neuroscience professor at the University of Luxembourg since 2014, when he received the support of the FNR through a PEARL Chair. He is in charge of the Clinical & Experimental Neuroscience research group at the LCSB and works as a neurologist at the CHL. On top of these activities, he will now be the Director of Transversal Translational Medicine at LIH. He will strengthen the links between these institutions by implementing projects that are part of a joint scientific strategy. In the long run, this shared strategy will be one of the driving forces turning Luxembourg into a translational research hub in Europe.