Completed Brain & Nervous System Education & Skills

UKDP: Integrated DEmentiA research environment (IDEA)

Funder MRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Imperial College London
Funding £5.6M
Period Mar 2015 — Mar 2016

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Two million volunteers have already joined the UK’s largest-ever study of dementia, and this project will build the tools to make sense of their data. Dementia research has been hampered by fragmented efforts—separate studies, incompatible data, and scattered equipment. This project tackles that directly. It will create a national network of PET/MR brain scanners to watch the molecular processes that drive dementia in living people. It will build a unified data platform so scientists can easily combine genetic, clinical, and lifestyle information from all 22 participating cohorts. And it will collect stem cells from adults with and without dementia to study how brain cells change as the disease begins and progresses. If successful, the UK will become an internationally unique place to study dementia. Researchers will no longer work in isolation. They will share expensive equipment, pool data across studies, and compare lab results directly with brain scans from the same people. This coordinated infrastructure should raise research standards, cut costs, and speed up the search for causes and treatments. The £12 million already invested in the UK Dementias Platform will be leveraged far more effectively, turning a massive dataset into a practical engine for discovery.

View original technical description
The UK Dementias Platform (UKDP) is a radically new approach to dementias research. It brings 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 £12M. In this proposal we want to improve UK infrastructure for dementia research so that the most can be made of the opportunity provided by UKDP. We wan to improve the infrastructure by buying important pieces of equipment that will put the UK at the forefront of dementia research worldwide and by establishing networks of scientists who will work together to make best use of the equipment. The three themes of the proposal are imaging, informatics and stem cells. For imaging we want to establish a network of PET/MR scanning facilities across the UK so that the molecular processes going on inside the brain that cause dementia can be studied. For informatics we want to be bring together bas many different types of data as possible and make it easy as possible for scientists to use them For stem cells we want to take cells form adults with and without dementia to find out how cells change as the dementias process begins and progresses. We believe these proposals will raise standards, reduce costs, and deliver innovative and coordinated research, making the UK an internationally unique place to study dementia.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Paul Matthews (Principal Investigator)Rexford Newbould (Co-Investigator)Robert Perneczky (Co-Investigator)Roger Gunn (Co-Investigator)William Hallett (Co-Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

UK Dementias Platform
Dementias Platform UK MR-PET Partnership
Dementias Platform UK Stem Cell Partnership
MICA: Dementias Platform UK 2 - Integrated Dementia Experimental Medicine
A next-generation MRI brain imaging platform for dementia research: from microstructure to function

Original classification

Research Grant

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.