Aiste Jekabsone is a senior scientist in the Laboratory of Preclinical Drug Investigation of the Institute of Cardiology, and Head of the Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Institute of Pharmaceutical Technologies in Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LSMU, Kaunas, Lithuania). She has MSc in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology from Vytautas Magnus University and a PhD in Biomedical science from Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (2002), where she investigated cell death pathways in ischemic myocardium. As a Postdoc fellow at the University of Cambridge (UK), Biochemistry department, she worked on nitric oxide signalling pathways in stroke models and investigated the role of microglial cells in Alzheimer's disease. She currently focuses on the involvement of mitochondria in neuro- and cardiovascular diseases, designing exosome-based technologies for drug delivery and regeneration and organotypic in vitro models for drug efficacy – toxicity screening.