The Department of Neurochemistry, created in 1999 had and continues to have a strong presence at the Institute of Biomolecular Chemistry. The Institute is part of the Chemical Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and profits from the excellent scientific environment including state-of-art NMR and Mass spectrometry methodology, computational chemistry, well recognized chemical library and efficient administration.
The Department of Neurochemistry provides education and research focusing on all main aspects of CNS drugs from the design and discovery of new active substances to fundamental aspects of their mechanism of action. This activity, sponsored by pharmaceutical industry as well as granting agencies, is running by a multidisciplinary team of young scientists and assistants, including chemists, molecular modellers, neurochemists, neurobiologists and pharmacologists, led by Dr. Julianna Kardos. The education in research aims to provide a scientific platform of theoretical knowledge, critical and analytical attitudes, and practical skills in the field of drug design and discovery by focussing on understanding mechanisms in models of epilepsy and ischemia.
The multidisciplinary team possesses all the experience, skills and equipments required to study neural function and dysfunction from the molecular level right up to the behaving animal, including radiotracer techniques to study binding and function of major inhibitory and excitatory CNS receptor and transporter subtypes; fluorescence detection-based fast kinetic techniques; electrophysiological setups equipped with either photodiode matrix system or fast CCD camera; confocal laser-scanning microscope. Resources available: animal house; cell culture, including organotypic slice culture and cell lines expressing cloned transporters; access to Human Brain Tissue Bank Budapest with more than 25000 entries and techniques of in vivo microdialysis.
The internationally recognized research at the Department of Neurochemistry is highly interdisciplinary; many collaborative research projects are established between groups at different departments, and between Department of Neurochemistry and other academic institutions and the pharmaceutical industry, nationally and internationally.