Professor Martin Rossor, Director of the NIHR Queen's Square Dementia Biomedical Research Unit (BRU), has been awarded £250,000 to help accelerate progress in dementias research as part of the MRC Dementias Research Platform UK (DPUK).
The platform is being set up to develop knowledge leading to new drug treatments and other therapies that could prevent or delay the onset and progression of dementias.
DPUK will bring together different cohorts from across seven universities so that experimental medicine can be embedded into which unit is best fitted to answer particular research questions.
DPUK is directed by Dr John Gallacher at the University of Cardiff, together with a team of investigators from UCL, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Oxford, Newcastle and Swansea.
Professor Rossor and his team at the BRU will use their award to support familial cohorts – patients with familial Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal dementia.
Professor Rossor said: “The advantage of doing research with these cohorts is that where it is clear an individual is a mutation carrier, and thus destined to get the disease, it is possible to identify the very earliest changes by following them before they become symptomatic.
“If a biomarker is identified in one of the sporadic population based cohorts in diseased individuals, we can see if this occurs in the familial cohort and at what stage i.e. before the disease is manifest. The other advantage is that we can also assess biomarkers to see if they are specific to a particular disease: to Alzheimer’s Disease or Frontotemporal dementia, or whether these are biomarkers of neurodegeneration per se”.
The MRC is providing £12 million funding for DPUK for an initial period of five years. This MRC funding is supplemented by £4 million from six partner companies. Investment has also recently been supplemented by £37 million funding for networks of clinical research infrastructure, announced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer last month.
