Recipient organisationCardiff UniversitySource-published name: Cardiff University
Funding£13.1M
PeriodJun 2014 — Aug 2015
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Two million people across 22 UK studies are contributing their health data to a single platform designed to uncover what causes dementia and how to slow it down. Dementia research has long been fragmented, with individual studies too small to detect subtle patterns in who develops the disease and why. The UK Dementias Platform solves this by pooling decades of data from two million participants, creating a resource large enough to identify drug targets and track how genetic risk, early biological changes, and the body’s failure to repair itself interact over time. The platform has received £4.5 million in funding, with an additional £7.5 million invited. If successful, the platform could accelerate the development of treatments that slow dementia’s progression—meaning people might keep their memory and independence for years longer. Even without a cure, delaying onset by five years would halve the number of people living with dementia. The project also tackles practical barriers: developing cheap, scalable ways to assess cognitive decline without requiring a doctor for every participant, and addressing the ethical questions around brain donation and detailed measurement studies. Industry partnerships aim to turn fundamental discoveries into therapies as quickly as possible.
View original technical description
The UK Dementias Platform (UKDP) is a radically new approach to dementias research, bringing together data from around 2,000,000 study participants from 22 cohorts to try and discover the causes of dementia and to find out ways of slowing it down. The platform has been funded to the level of £4.5M and invited to apply for a further £7.5M. To achieve our goals of discovering the causes of dementia and finding out ways to slow it down, we will analyse data collected over many decades from throughout the UK to identify targets for drugs studies. We will also enrich strategically selected cohorts to provide resources for dementias research in general. This will involve finding out how the early dementia processes begin, how our genes affect our risk of dementia and where our body goes wrong in maintaining and repairing itself. There are many practical challenges involved in doing this work including knowing how to assess dementia in large studies where having everyone examined by a doctor would be prohibitively expensive. Another challenge is how to measure cognitive decline in the population as when people begin to decline they are frequently less motivated to do cognitive tests. There are also important ethical issues surrounding this work and we have specific projects looking at ethical legal and social issues surrounding taking part in detailed measurement studies as well as in considering brain donation. To help make an impact as soon as possible, we will work closely with industry partners who are best placed to turn basic scientific knowledge into effective therapies. Even if we cannot cure dementia in the short term, it would count as a success if we found ways of slowing it down so that nobody need lose their dignity as they grew older.
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