Reflections on progress made with the Novo Nordisk tandem grant

The projected mutual research was directly based on the clinical challenges in hydrocephalus treatment: “The available treatment of hydrocephalus is purely surgical and based on a mechanical perception of the brain fluid dynamics with the favoured clinical approach being implantation of a shunt with an average lifetime of 2–4 years, and the patients thus face a lifetime of repeated acute surgical shunt revisions”.

The mutual research objectives were to create the basis for future telemetric monitoring of intracranial pressure dynamics in hydrocephalus patients and identify pharmacological targets for therapeutic management of various types of hydrocephalus. The vision was – and is still - future addition of pharmacological treatments to the current surgical procedure undertaken for hydrocephalus patients.

A key issue in the collaboration was to delineate the molecular machinery underlying CSF production, determine regulatory factors in the CSF of various groups of hydrocephalus patients, and resolve the regulatory effect of these factors on the molecular machinery underlying CSF production in both humans and animal models.

At the time of grant termination, the collaboration has resulted in 12 mutual publications on molecular profiles and 10 publications on ICP regulation, and the fruitful clinical — basic neuroscience collaboration is planned to continue.