Cardiff scientists to head up £16m dementia programme

Two million UK volunteers are to take part in the world’s biggest research project, being led by Welsh scientists, investigating Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia.

Their health and lifestyle data will be linked to genetic, brain imaging and cognitive studies to improve understanding of dementia, paving the way to new diagnostic tests and treatments.

The £16m UK Dementias Research Platform (UKDP) launched by the Medical Research Council and headed up by Dr John Gallacher from Cardiff University, will receive both Government and industry funding.

The idea is to look at illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease, seeking ways of earlier detection, improved treatment and prevention “by looking not just at what is going wrong in the brain, but at the brain in the context of the whole body”.

Although the programme will be headed up by Cardiff scientists, they will be supported by colleagues from another seven universities – Cambridge, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Newcastle, Oxford, Swansea and University College London – and more than two million volunteers over 50.

The volunteers, all aged 50 and over, will have already been recruited to existing population-scale studies such as UK Biobank and the Million Women Study.

The UKDP will use data – linking medical and lifestyle information from the largest group of participants in dementias research to emerging biological data from genetic studies, brain imaging and cognitive testing.

This could provide a better understanding of who might be at risk of dementia, possible triggers that lead to disease, and what might speed up or slow down its progression.

In turn that means researchers will be able to identify biomarkers which should lead to the creation of more accurate clinical trials.

“We now know that neurodegeneration can be linked to changes taking place in parts of the body seemingly unrelated to the brain and many years before dementia is diagnosed,” says Cardiff University’s Dr John Gallacher, who is director of the UKDP.

These can include inflammation or infection in a completely different organ which may be related to the development of dementia or to accelerating its onset.

“So it’s imperative that we look at the different stages of disease development,” Gallacher goes on. “People who are yet to develop dementia, those who are known to be at risk of developing it and those who are already in the early stages of the disease.”

Several companies from the pharma industry are also involved: AstraZeneca subsidiary MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Janssen R&D, Imperial’s Ixico spin-off, biomarkers specialist SomaLogic and biotech firm Araclon.