The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is a unique MRC institute embedded across six universities with members working seamlessly together as integrated teams to address major questions in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s diseases, FTD/ALS, and Vascular dementia.
Experts across the UK DRI would work collaboratively with the UK Biobank data to create new insights and knowledge which can be applied to treating neurodegenerative disease. For instance, in work over the last year, one team showed that Parkinson’s disease can be predicted, by examining UK Biobank data, 7 years before it would usually be diagnosed.
Some major questions we would examine are:
– What are the earliest changes leading to neurodegenerative disease and dementia?
– What are their causes and how can we disrupt them?
– How do these diseases evolve from being “silent” towards producing symptoms?
The UK DRI has specialist researchers from across the UK working on different aspects of disease using different tools, who will come together to work on the UK Biobank dataset. By examining the genetic data held on participants alongside the biomarkers and MRI images, UK DRI researchers can start to uncover the pathways which are at fault when neurodegenerative disease first start, and to identify ways to treat or prevent the disease.
Project duration: 36 months in the first instance
The impact of this should be to allow investigators to identify neurodegenerative diseases in the general population more readily and with higher accuracy, and much earlier on in life than previously. This should enable testing of preventative treatments administered years before disease symptoms arise.