Andre Fischer PhD

Andre Fischer obtained his Ph.D. degree from Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine and the Georg-August University Goettingen in molecular mechanisms of learning and memory. He obtained a postdoctoral research fellow at Li-Huei Tsai laboratory at Picower Center for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA). From 2007 to 2011, Prof. Fischer was leading the laboratory for aging and cognitive diseases; a junior research group funded by the EURYI Award at the European Neuroscience Institute (ENI), Göttingen. Since 2011, Andre Fischer is a Professor at the Medical Center of the University of Göttingen and a Spokesman for the German Center for Neurodegenerative diseases (DZNE) site Goettingen.

The long-term goal of Prof. Andre Fischer’s research is to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying brain diseases and to develop neuroprotective and neuroregenerative therapeutic approaches. There is now accumulating evidence that an individual level of health or disease critically depends on the interaction between genes and the environment. Epigenetic mechanisms such as histone-modification, DNA-methylation, and non-coding RNA-mediated processes are key regulators of gene-environment interactions. Thus, targeting epigenetic mechanisms is currently discussed as a novel and promising therapeutic avenue to treat neurodegenerative diseases. Prof. Fischer has pioneered this novel field of neurogenetics that investigates the role of genome-environment interactions and epigenome plasticity during the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases. Prof. Fischer is especially interested in the mechanisms that underlie Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and anxiety disorders. Similarly, his group addresses the impact of protective environmental factors such as physical and cognitive exercise on the onset and progression of AD phenotypes. Andre’s particular aim is to identify epigenetic drug targets and to establish epigenome changes as suitable biomarkers of disease progression and therapy. To this end, he employs animal models and relevant patient material.