Meet Anders Nykjær

Nearly 30 years ago, Anders was part of the research team that identified the Vps10p-domain receptor sortilin and its interaction with progranulin. Since then, his work has helped establish sortilin as a promising therapeutic target in neurodegenerative disease, particularly frontotemporal dementia, where progranulin biology is increasingly central to patient stratification and treatment development.

As co-founder and CSO of Vesper Bio, Anders is now helping translate that long-running scientific story into the clinic. Vesper’s lead candidate, VES001, is an orally administered small molecule designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and rebalance progranulin levels in patients with FTD. The program has now entered early clinical development, offering a potential route toward disease-modifying treatment in an area where no such therapies are currently available.

“The biggest bottleneck is still translational predictability: our ability to determine early whether a therapeutic hypothesis will work in humans. This is particularly true for neurodegenerative diseases. We remain too dependent on model systems that do not adequately capture human disease biology. The solution is not a single technology, but a combination of better human-relevant models, earlier biomarker integration, richer longitudinal datasets, and tighter feedback loops between clinical and preclinical research.”