WCMM Fellow Iben Lundgaard has been awarded a prestigious research grant from the Lundbeck Foundation, providing just over DKK 6.5 million over five years to advance research into the brain’s glymphatic system and its role in neurological disease.
The funding will support an ambitious multidisciplinary research programme, with the project title: The Nordic Centre for Glymphatic Biology, aimed at improving understanding of how the brain clears metabolic waste and how failures in this process contribute to neurodegeneration and vascular brain disorders. The long-term vision of the project is to translate emerging discoveries in glymphatic biology into clinical applications that enable earlier diagnosis and improved treatment strategies for neurological disease.
Advancing a rapidly emerging field
Iben Lundgaard leads research at the intersection of neuroscience, vascular biology and translational medicine. Her work has been instrumental in defining the importance of the glymphatic system for brain health, aging and disease and in moving fundamental discoveries toward clinical relevance.
The glymphatic system is a brain-wide fluid transport pathway that facilitates exchange between cerebrospinal fluid and brain tissue, effectively serving as the brain’s waste-clearance mechanism. By removing proteins and metabolites, including amyloid-β, a molecule strongly linked to neurodegenerative disorders, the system plays a central role in maintaining brain homeostasis. Increasing evidence shows that impaired glymphatic function contributes to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological disorders.
Although identified only within the past decade, glymphatic biology has rapidly become a major focus in modern neuroscience, reshaping scientific understanding of how the brain maintains health over the lifespan.
From fundamental discovery to clinical translation
The newly funded project will expand Lundgaard’s ongoing investigations with the long-term ambition of establishing a Nordic Center for Glymphatic Biology. The research programme aims to bridge basic mechanistic insights and clinical implementation, creating new tools and therapeutic strategies targeting brain clearance pathways.
The project is structured around three primary scientific objectives:
- identifying molecular targets capable of enhancing glymphatic flow,
- developing diagnostic methods to assess glymphatic function in aging and disease, and
- testing glymphatic enhancers using non-invasive imaging approaches.
A central disease focus is vascular pathology, particularly small vessel disease (SVD), a major contributor to vascular dementia and a significant factor in Alzheimer’s disease. SVD and related cerebrovascular insufficiency account for approximately 40 percent of age-related cognitive impairment. Research increasingly indicates that vascular disease not only causes white-matter degeneration but also profoundly suppresses glymphatic function, suggesting a causal and mutually reinforcing relationship between vascular dysfunction, impaired brain clearance and neurodegeneration.
New therapeutic opportunities
Beyond understanding disease mechanisms, the project seeks to identify drug targets that improve glymphatic clearance and to develop new strategies for delivering biologic therapeutics to the brain. One long-term goal is to establish glymphatic administration as a platform for transporting drugs that otherwise cannot cross the blood–brain barrier. A major challenge in treating neurological disorders.
A cross-scale research approach
Iben Lundgaard is an associate professor at Lund University, Department of Experimental Medical Science, where her laboratory investigates how fluid dynamics, vascular biology and cellular mechanisms regulate brain clearance.
Her research integrates advanced experimental and clinical methodologies, including ultra-high-field MRI in both animal models and humans, light-sheet microscopy of cleared tissue volumes, electron microscopy, large-animal models, and translational human neuroimaging. This cross-scale approach enables mechanistic studies that connect molecular and physiological processes with clinical outcomes.
Through this new grant, Lundgaard and her collaborators aim to accelerate the translation of glymphatic research from experimental discovery to clinical practice, ultimately contributing to improved prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of neurological disease.