AIAS Fellow Rasmus O. Bak new Lundbeck Foundation Fellow
As one of the most promising biomedical science researchers, Geneticist and AIAS Fellow Rasmus O. Bak receives a prestigious grant of DKK 10 million by the Lundbeck Foundation.
AIAS-COFUND Fellow Rasmus Otkjær Bak and Assistant Professor at the Department of Biomedicine, at Aarhus University can now also entitle himself a ‘Lundbeck Foundation Fellow’. This week Rasmus Otkjær Bak has received the impressive grant of DKK 10 million by The Lundbeck Foundation to boost his research in genetics even further. The grant runs over a five-year period and will enable Bak to build up his own research group. The Lundbeck Foundation has supported five biomedical researchers with a DKK10 million grant – three of these five new Lundbeck Foundation Fellows are from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University.
Genome editing
Rasmus Otkjær Bak will use CRISPR technology to edit genomes in the stem cells of the blood and, thus, to remove genetic mutations and cure a range of serious blood diseases. He will initially attempt to create a new tool for improving the efficiency of genome editing of the blood’s stem cells in the laboratory to increase the number of corrected stem cells for transplantation back into patients.
His second goal is to identify a method for correcting genomes in the blood’s stem cells by an injection into the patient instead of removing the cells from the body first.
“This is not something that’s just around the corner – we reckon it’ll take a relatively long time – but it would be a total game changer because this would be a drug that we could mass-produce, store and send, for instance, to third-world countries, enabling us to cure many more patients,” says Rasmus Otkjær Bak.
The Lundbeck Foundation Fellowships
The new fellowship that Bak has received goes very well hand-in-hand with his AIAS fellowship due to research concentration as the scope of both fellowships. “The aim of the scholarships is to give talented young scientists a unique opportunity to conduct targeted and concentrated research over a five-year period and, at the same time, to build up a research team and to grow as research directors”, says Anne-Marie Engel, Director of Research at the Lundbeck Foundation, about the Lundbeck Foundation scholarships.
Read more about the Lundbeck Foundation and the new Lundbeck Foundation Fellows here
Contact
Rasmus O. Bak, AIAS Fellow, Assistant Professor
Phone: +45 93 92 91 00
bak@aias.au.dk
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS) and
Dept. of Biomedicine
Aarhus University
Denmark