Patrick Ejlerskov

Background

About Patrick Ejlerskov

Patrick Ejlerskov received his PhD from University of Copenhagen in 2012. Here Patrick worked with brain macrophages, microglia, and their regulation of the superoxide-generating complex, the NADPH oxidase. In addition, he established a cellular model of Parkinsons disease in which he analyzed the autophagy pathway and potential spreading mechanisms of the disease. This was carried out under the supervision of Associate Professor Frederik Vilhardt in the lab of Professor Bo van Deurs. During his PhD, he was a visiting scientist in University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, working with state-of-the-art two-photon in vivo brain imaging analyzing T-cell recruitment to the brain. In his postdoc he joined the lab of Professor Shohreh Issazadeh-Navikas, and as main author he described the relationship between interferon-beta regulated autophagy and development of Parkinson’s disease. This work was published in Cell. During his last postdoc period he worked in the laboratory of Professor David Rubinsztein, University of Cambridge, UK, a world-leading expert in autophagy and neurodegeneration. Together with Professor Roger Pocock, Monash University, Australia, they published a joint paper showing that interferon-beta regulates the microRNA, miR-1, which in turn reduces translation of the Rab7 inhibitor, TBC1D15. Collectively, this promotes fusion between autophagosomes and lysosomes and thereby reduces accumulation of neurotoxic protein aggregates related to Huntington's and Parkinson's disease. This work was published in eLife 2019. Currently, he is working at the Danish Dementia Research Centre, Rigshospitalet, exploring the hypothesis that neurotropic viruses can be an initiating factor for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In this work, he uses human neurons and brain organoids derived from iPSCs from patients with neurodegenerative disease. Primary fields of interest Autophagy Age-related neurodegenerative diseases Neuroimmunology Neuroinflammation Virology human iPSCs Brain organoids