Biography

In 2006, Igor Adameyko graduated with PhD from Lobachevsky State University (Russia) after three years of joint program at Dartmouth Medical School (USA), where he studied heart morphogenesis and the role of transcriptional factors in cardiomyocyte fate determination. After the PhD years, Igor joined the lab of Professor Patrik Ernfors at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and stayed there as a postdoc for the next six years. During that time, Igor discovered that nerve-associated Schwann cell precursors are multipotent and represent a completely new origin of pigmented melanocytes. That work was published in Cell and attracted lots of attention from researchers all over the world. In the very beginning of 2012, Igor Adameyko established his independent lab at Karolinska Institutet, currently at the department of Physiology and Pharmacology. Since then, his research was focused on multipotency of glial progenitors and non-canonical functions of peripheral nerves in development, disease and regeneration. In 2020, Igor became a Professor and Department Chair at Medical University of Vienna. Recently, Igor and his team discovered that autonomic neurons and chromaffin cells are derived from multipotent nerve-associated Schwann cell precursors. This concept carries significant weight since it also applies to the development of neuroblastoma, neurofibromatosis and other neural crest-derived tumors. Can Schwann cells be genuinely multipotent? If so, this would transform the above discoveries into a global concept in which nerve-associated progenitors could generate various cell types during not only physiological development but also adulthood, including malignancies. Now, Igor Adameyko is working on how the fundamental aspects of the developing neural crest lineage, mostly including multipotent Schwann cell precursors, are related to the origin of neuroblastoma and pheochromocytoma.