Completed Brain & Nervous System Education & Skills

UKDP: Integrated DEmentiA research environment (IDEA)

Funder MRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Newcastle University
Funding £2.8M
Period Jun 2015 — Jun 2016

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Two million people have already contributed data to the UK’s largest dementia research effort, and now the project is buying new brain scanners and building stem-cell labs to turn that data into usable discoveries. The problem is that dementia research has been fragmented. Different studies collect different kinds of information—brain scans, genetic profiles, cognitive tests, medical records—but they are rarely combined in ways that reveal the underlying biology. Without that integration, researchers cannot easily ask how a specific molecular change in the brain relates to a patient’s symptoms over time. This project builds the infrastructure to change that. It will establish a network of PET/MR scanners across the UK to image the molecular processes driving dementia in living brains. It will create a unified informatics platform so scientists can analyse diverse data together. And it will generate stem-cell lines from people with and without dementia, allowing researchers to watch how cells change as the disease begins and progresses. If it succeeds, the UK will become an internationally unique place to study dementia—not because of any single breakthrough, but because the infrastructure will let scientists ask better questions faster, at lower cost, and with larger, more diverse datasets than anywhere else.

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

David Burn (Principal Investigator)Ian McKeith (Co-Investigator)Ross Maxwell (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

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