Pentti J. Tienari

Education: • MD 1989 (Univ. Helsinki) PhD 1994 (Univ. Helsinki) • Associate professor (experimental neurology) 1998 (Univ. Helsinki) • Specialist in clinical neurology 2005 (Univ. Helsinki) • Professor of neuroimmunology (2013) Scientific education and career: 1. Predoc 1990 – 1993. National Public Health Institute, Helsinki, Finland (Prof Leena Peltonen), and Dept Neurology, Univ. Helsinki (Prof Jorma Palo). Academic dissertation 17 Dec. 1993. 2. EMBO post-doctoral fellowship 1 Aug. 1993 – 31 July 1995. Univ. Heidelberg, ZMBH (Prof. Konrad Beyreuther) and EMBL (Dr. Carlos Dotti). 3. Visiting scientist, Univ. Heidelberg, ZMBH, (Prof. Konrad Beyreuther) 1 Aug. 1995 – 31 May 1996. 4. Group leader, Dept. Neurology, Univ. Helsinki, and Translational Immunology Research Program, Univ. Helsinki, 1996 onwards. 5. Visits to NIH, National Institute of Aging, Bethesda, USA in 2002, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014. Current position: • Chief neurologist May 1st 2012 (Helsinki University Hospital). • Professor of Neuroimmunology, 2013 (University of Helsinki) • Research group leader (Research Programs Unit, Translational Immunology, Biomedicum, Univ Helsinki) Synopsis: Pentti Tienari is chief neurologist at the Helsinki University Hospital (HUH) from 2012 and professor of neuroimmunology at the University of Helsinki from 2013 onwards. In addition to clinical experience in neurology he has research experience including epidemiology, genetics, cell biology and immunology of neurological diseases. The studies in multiple sclerosis have characterized a geographical high-risk cluster with genetic founder effect and identified about a dozen genetic risk factors of in Finland (demonstrating relative genetic homogeneity since the total number of risk loci is > 150). His cell biological postdoctoral work at the University of Heidelberg during 1993-96 unraveled axonal sorting signals of amyloid precursor protein and identified a novel pathway for the generation of intraneuronal amyloid-beta peptide (published in EMBO J, PNAS, J Neurosci, Nature Med). His group played an important role in the discovery, by an international consortium, of the C9ORF72 mutation in ALS and frontotemporal dementia (2 papers in Lancet Neurol, one in Neuron 2010-12) and his group was the first to make iPS cells from mutations carriers, which led to a major paper in collaboration with Johns Hopkins researchers describing the pathogenetic mechanisms of C9ORF72 hexanucleotide expansion (published in Neuron 2013). He is one of the inventors in the C9ORF72 diagnostics patent. He has interest in genome medicine and by using next-generation sequencing his group has discovered somatic mutations in multiple sclerosis patients' CD8+ T-cells. The role of T-cell somatic mutations in multiple sclerosis is currently unclear - and puzzling - therefore his group is devoted to continue on this path in multiple sclerosis research. He has published ca. 200 articles, which have been cited >16000 times, (h-index 50, Scopus, Aug 2022).