Houskaprize 2024 awarded to Jürgen Knoblich
With the Houskaprize, the B&C Private Foundation honors top Austrian research that is relevant to Austria as a business location. With a total endowment of 750,000 euros, the Houskaprize is the largest private prize for application-oriented research in Austria.
Knoblich and his team received the award for their development of organoids as models for brain development and disease. Neurological diseases are the most common cause of disability worldwide and the second most common cause of death. Previous research methods, based on animal experiments or patient observations, do not fully capture the extent of the diseases or are not fully transferable to humans. This hinders the development of effective therapies. To solve this problem, Jürgen Knoblich and his team at IMBA are developing and investigating organoid models of human brain development and brain disorders. The research team has succeeded in reproducing the processes of brain development in the laboratory from individual parts to complete circuits on the basis of human stem cells. These brain organoids make it possible to study brain diseases and therapeutic substances directly on human tissue. The first significant applications have been found in epilepsy and autism as well as in research on the ZIKA virus. The universal potential of these models could revolutionize drug research for brain diseases. Jürgen Knoblich and colleagues founded a:head bio AG, a biotech company focusing on the development of next generation therapeutics for the treatment of brain disorders based on human cerebral organoids.
The Houska Prize for Jürgen Knoblich is already the second of the coveted prizes to be awarded to a researcher at IMBA: In 2018, Stefan Ameres, then group leader at IMBA and now group leader at the neighboring Max Perutz Labs, received the Houskaprize for the development of SLAMseq.
The startup a:head bio is the exclusive partner for the commercialization of this groundbreaking technology.