Recipient organisationCardiff UniversitySource-published name: Cardiff University
Funding£1.9M
PeriodMar 2015 — Mar 2016
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
Two million people have already joined the UK’s largest dementia research effort, and now the project is buying the equipment to make that data useful. Dementia research has long been fragmented: different studies use different scanners, store data in incompatible formats, and rarely combine genetic information with brain imaging. This project tackles that fragmentation head-on. It will establish a network of PET/MR scanners across the UK to watch the molecular processes that drive dementia unfold inside living brains. It will build a unified data platform so scientists can easily cross-reference everything from cognitive tests to blood biomarkers. And it will collect stem cells from adults with and without dementia to study how brain cells change as the disease begins. If this succeeds, the UK will become the only place in the world where a researcher can link a person’s genetic profile, brain scan, and living cell behaviour in a single analysis. That infrastructure could accelerate the search for drugs that slow dementia, and make clinical trials faster and cheaper by helping researchers identify the right patients. The work is primarily about building research capacity rather than delivering an immediate treatment, but without this kind of coordinated infrastructure, the two million participants’ data risks remaining an untapped resource.
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.
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