Sonja Bröer

Sonja Bröer is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Freie Universität Berlin. She has received her veterinary training and a PhD in neurosciences and pharmacology at Stiftung Tierärztliche Hochschule Hannover under supervision of Wolfgang Löscher, a renowned expert in epilepsy research.

Throughout her PhD and postdoctoral research, Sonja has established ongoing collaborations with Michael Rogawski at UC Davis and Christophe Bernard at Aix-Marseille Université, in whose labs she also spent some time of her postgraduate training. Her work focused on novel treatment approaches for pharmacoresistant epilepsy, such as intracerebral drug delivery and transplantation of neural stem cells.

Neurotransplantation remained a focus of Dr. Bröer’s work when she transferred to a spin-off biotechnology start-up from UCSF, Neurona Therapeutics. Driven by the vision to revolutionize and improve treatment outcomes for those living with chronic neurological disorders by developing restorative cell therapies, Dr. Bröer led the preclinical efficacy testing of their first cell therapy product, which is currently evaluated in patients suffering from mesial temporal lobe epilepsy in a clinical trial.

In 2020, Sonja Bröer returned to academia to start her own lab at the Freie Universität Berlin, where her research continues to focus on neural stem cells. She is currently working on a model of virus-induced encephalitis to study the effect of infections, activated immune cells and associated symptoms such as seizures on the neuronal stem cell niche.