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Anders Björklund, MD, PhD - Scientific Advisory Board
Professor
Department of Neurobiology
Wallenberg Neuroscience Center, Lund University
Lund , Sweden

Anders Björklund made his first important contributions, as a young postdoc in the early 1970s, in studies using the glyoxylic acid histofluorescence technique. This highly sensitive method allowed for the first time a detailed anatomical mapping of the dopaminergic and noradrenergic systems in the brain and led to the discovery (parallel with other investigators) of important projections of the mesencephalic dopaminergic system to the neocortex and areas of the limbic system.

In the mid-1970s, Björklund's research interests shifted to central nervous system (CNS) regeneration and repair. In 1971, he started to experiment with transplantation of cells and tissue fragments to the intact and damaged rat brain. This led to a series of seminal papers, beginning in 1976, in which he and collaborators were for the first time able to define the conditions for successful transplantation of developing neurons and neuroblasts to the adult CNS.

Strengthened by the arrival of two gifted researchers, Stephen Dunnett, PhD, and Fred H Gage, PhD, Björklund then went on to explore this new cell repair approach in a range of rodent models of neurodegenerative diseases, trauma and aging. In 1987, Bjorklund teamed up with his former student, Olle Lindvall, MD, PhD, to initiate the first clinical trials of fetal neural cell grafting in patients with Parkinson's disease. This pioneering clinical program has been important in that it has given proof of principle for the feasibility of the cell replacement approach in the brain, and paved the way for recent developments in the application of the novel stem cell technology for brain repair. During the last decade Björklund's lab has pioneered the use of neural stem cells and immortalized neural progenitor cell lines for CNS transplantation and repair, and for ex vivo gene transfer to the brain.