Dr. Peter Heutink

Biography

Peter Heutink studied Biology at the University of Amsterdam. He received his PhD in Human Genetics in 1993 from the Erasmus University Rotterdam where he worked on developing approaches to identify genes for diseases with a complex inheritance. In 1994 he started his own research group at the Erasmus University Rotterdam focusing on identifying genes for human diseases using linkage analysis and positional cloning approaches. From 1997 the focused shifted towards neurological diseases especially Frontal Temporal Dementia (FTD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) and his group identified mutations in for example the MAPT, DJ-1, FGF14, TITF1 genes for FTD, PD, ataxia and chorea. In 2003 he moved to the VU University Medical Center where he started the research section of Medical Genomics and helped to build the Center for Neurogenomics and Cognitive Research and the Neuroscience Campus Amsterdam. During this time he contributed to the identification of genetic risk factors for FTD, PD, PSP and several psychiatric disorders using Genome Wide Association Studies and his group developed statistical methods to detect genetic epistasis and to perform analysis on gene networks instead of single genes. He also received an affiliation at the RIKEN Omics Center in Yokohama Japan working on the Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Genome (FANTOM) and participates in the FANTOM5 and 6 consortia. In 2012 he moved to DZNE Tübingen where he started the research group Genomics for Neurodegenerative Diseases and became the site speaker.

Research Interest

The underlying causes for neurodegenerative disease are still largely unknown but there is clear evidence that genetic risk factors play an important role. The identification of such genetic risk factors provides us with important starting points to study the molecular processes that lead to disease as they act at the very beginning of the disease process. The research focus of our group is therefore to identify genetic risk factors for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Frontal-Temporal Dementia/Motor Neuron Disease, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy and Ataxia in close collaboration with our clinical partners and to characterize the biological consequences of these mutations and risk factors by using molecular biology and genomic approaches.