Completed Brain & Nervous System Lungs & Breathing

Consortium of Neuroimmunology of Mood Disorders and Alzheimer's Disease.

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Cambridge
Funding £3.4M
Period Jan 2015 — Jan 2020

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A new consortium of drug companies and university labs will test whether anti-inflammatory drugs can treat Alzheimer’s disease and mood disorders by targeting the immune system. These two brain conditions are currently treated separately, but both involve inflammation—the body’s immune response gone awry. Existing anti-inflammatory drugs, developed by the industrial partners Janssen and Lundbeck, have never been systematically tested in patients selected based on their immune profiles. The consortium aims to close that gap. In the first three years, researchers will identify immune markers—such as levels of inflammatory proteins or gene activity in immune cells—that signal Alzheimer’s or mood disorders. They will then link these peripheral markers to brain inflammation, behaviour, and disease progression in both patients and animal models. In the final two years, they will use those markers to select patients most likely to respond, then run experimental trials of anti-inflammatory drugs. If successful, the work could shift how these disorders are diagnosed and treated—moving from a one-size-fits-all approach to immune-based stratification. That might eventually mean more effective, personalised treatments for millions of people, and a new class of drugs for conditions that currently lack them.

View original technical description
We propose to form a consortium of academic and industrial partners to address the therapeutic challenges of Alzheimers disease and mood disorders by a shared, innovative focus on immunological mechanisms of these key neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatment by anti-inflammatory drugs. The industrial partners (Janssen and Lundbeck) will contribute drug discovery know-how and access to anti-inflammatory drugs. The academic partners will contribute expertise in neuroimaging, clinical phen otyping, animal models and informatics. The work will be organised as two programmes, focused on Alzheimer's disease and mood disorders, and four cross-cutting technical platforms (cytometry, proteomics, PET and MRI). In phase 1 (years 1-3), we will validate peripheral immunological phenotypes, e.g., cytokine levels or macrophage transcriptomes, as markers of Alzheimer's disease and mood disorders. We will seek mechanistically to link peripheral immunophenotypes to markers of central (brain) inflammation and microglial activation; to brain function and behaviour; and to longitudinal changes in the clinical phenotypes and animal models. In phase 2 (years 3-5), we will use these biomarkers in experimental medicine studies designed to test mechanism-of-action and / or therapeutic proof-of-concept of anti-inflammatory drugs in immunologically stratified cohorts of patients with Alzheimer's disease or mood disorders.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Edward Bullmore (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

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Consortium for Neuroimmunology of Mood Disorders and Alzheimer's disease
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Original classification

Strategic Award - Science

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