Capital award for UK DRI at King's College London

The UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at King’s College London is buying capital equipment to launch its first scientific programmes and scale up its operations. This funding addresses a critical gap: the UK lacks a coordinated, large-scale research infrastructure dedicated to dementia, a condition that devastates millions of families and strains healthcare systems. The new institute was established to lead the UK’s dementia research effort and forms a core part of achieving the Prime Minister’s Challenge on Dementia 2020. If successful, the equipment—housed alongside the new Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience building—will provide the physical location for three initial research programmes, with capacity to grow significantly in subsequent years. The UK DRI as a whole will help cement the UK’s world-leading position by promoting innovative approaches and forging much closer collaboration and integration of ongoing UK research efforts. This is primarily an infrastructure investment: it does not itself produce new treatments, but it creates the conditions for fundamental and translational science that could eventually slow, prevent, or treat dementia. Without such capital, promising research remains scattered and under-resourced.