Anders Björklund (born 11 July 1945) is a Swedish neuroscientist[1] and pioneer in the study of cell- and gene-based reparative and neuroprotective mechanisms in the brain.

[2] In the 1980s, his team at Lund University pioneered the development of stem cell-based therapies for brain repair, and his group has for more than four decades played a leading role in the development and use of dopamine cell replacement in patients with Parkinson's disease[3] Björklund was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1989,[4] and Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, in 2011.

[5][6] Björklund started as a research student in the laboratory of Bengt Falck, the co-inventor of the Falck-Hillarp histofluorescence method for the visualization of monoamine-containing neurons in the brain, and defended his doctoral thesis at Lund University, Sweden, in 1969.

Together with Stephen Dunnett and Rusty Gage, who had joined his lab as postdocs in the early 1980s, and two PhD students, Patrik Brundin and Ole Isacson, Björklund's group was first to report functional cell replacement in rodent models of Parkinson's and Huntington's disease,[7][8] and in animal models of hippocampal damage and cognitive decline,[9][10] using transplants of fetal neural tissue.

In 1986, the Lund team obtained permission to use tissue derived from aborted human fetuses in a series of open-label clinical trials in patients with Parkinson's disease.