Research highlight

Investing in the future of dementia research with over £5m awarded to early career researchers

This £545,010 award aims to understand why women are more likely to develop dementia and use this new knowledge to develop more effective guidelines for gender-specific dementia prevention, diagnosis and care.

Sarah Naomi will use advanced causal inference methods to analyse UK population cohorts. She will focus on midlife, when women undergo major hormonal changes during menopause and when women tend to experience more health problems.

Dr Kamen Tsvetanov, Project grant, £203,904, University of Cambridge

Kamen aims to investigate the role of pulse pressure in dementia by using computational models to discover causal pathways and whether antihypertensive medications impact dementia risk.

Dr Marcella Montagnese, Career development grant, University of Cambridge, £71,965

Marcella aims to validate BrainChart population modelling tools using longitudinal clinical datasets to examine interactions between risk factors and neural changes. 

Dr Sarah Gregory, Career development grant, University of St Andrews, £54,283

Sarah will analyse whether modifiable risk factors for dementia are statistically linked with any of the three main types of oestrogen, which may help explain why women are at higher risk for Alzheimer’s and progress faster than men. 

This £345,029 award will explore whether remotely collected saliva samples could facilitate community-based Alzheimer’s disease screening improving diagnosis rates, particularly in remote communities.

Amyloid beta has been shown to be stable in saliva samples for up to seven days, and higher levels of amyloid can be detected in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Dr Geraint Phillips, University of Exeter, will recruit older adults through the PROTECT longitudinal cohort study and compare salivary samples against blood-based biomarkers and longitudinal cognitive tests.

Dr Joseph Kwon, Postdoctoral fellowship, University of Oxford, £357,398

Joseph will analyse data from the SANDBOX study to better understand how digital tools and blood tests could improve dementia diagnosis particularly for people from disadvantaged or underrepresented backgrounds.

Dr Emma Elliott, Career development grant, University of Manchester, £68,059

Emma is examining the short cognitive tests used by GPs to assess for dementia to improve these for people with different educational backgrounds and from ethnic minority groups for who these tests are not always accurate.

This £546,280 award will focus on helping people with dementia manage problems with walking and balance.

Dr Ríona McArdle, Newcastle University, will work with people living with dementia, carers, and health and social care professionals to best understand which mobility problems matter most in everyday life. She will use this understanding to co-produce post-diagnostic mobility support strategies using digital solutions. A linked PhD project will also look at how to make digital tools more accessible for people from underserved communities and diverse backgrounds.

This £548,048 award will support the development and feasibility testing of an intervention designed to reduce the impact of cognitive disability in people with atypical forms of Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia.

Dr Aida Suarez-Gonzalez, at University College London, will work with clinicians, researchers, and people living with these conditions to investigate symptom-specific strategies that can help them maintain daily functioning and improve quality of life. She will use these findings to develop adaptable resources for clinical practice and replicable individual-level protocols for future clinical trials. As part of the project, she will assess the feasibility of this approach through a pilot clinical trial, laying the groundwork for a future randomised clinical trial.

 

Dr Lesley Williamson, Postdoctoral fellowship, King’s College London, £348,029

Lesley will evaluate how a tool, Integrated Palliative Outcome Scale for Dementia (IPOS-DEM), currently used to assess palliative care could be used to improve access to person-centred care in primary care, such as GP surgeries. 

This £549,921 award aims to establish the role of ITM2B and understand if it is a key driver in Alzheimer’s pathology as well as a rare form of familial dementia.

ITM2B is highly expressed in microglia and has a role in disease-associated microglial responses. Dr Charlie Arber, University College London, will generate ITM2B reporter lines to monitor how ITM2B impacts microglial cells. He will also examine ITM2B in patient blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples, to determine whether it could be used as a biomarker and indicate disease progression.

Dr Daniel Maddison, £252,480, Postdoctoral fellowship, University of Cambridge

Daniel aims to develop a live-neuron reporter system to observe proteostasis in real-time using high-resolution lifetime microscopy and enhance clearing of tau aggregates.

Dr Steven Dierksmeier, £304,766, Clinician and Healthcare Professionals Training fellowship, University of Oxford

Steven will use hippocampal tissue slice culture to assess the impact of soluble TREM2 on synaptic plasticity, which is not yet fully understood.

Dr Miguel Ramirez-Moreno, £352,868, Postdoctoral fellowship, University of Southampton

Miguel aims to demonstrate how Drosophila could be used to characterise new disease mechanisms by screening proteins thought to drive neurodegeneration.

This £549,855 award aims to use subcellular proteomics in patient-derived stem cell neurons to map intracellular interactions that drive synaptic dysfunction in frontotemporal dementia.

One of the earliest changes in frontotemporal dementia is the breakdown of synapses, but it’s not fully understood how this breakdown happens. Dr Ruxandra Dafinca, University of Oxford, will spatially map the organisation and distribution of proteins to understand which pathways are disrupted by TDP-43 aggregation. She’ll use this new understanding to identify novel therapeutic targets.

Dr Yazead Buhidma, £333,260, Postdoctoral fellowship, University College London

Yazead will characterise astrocytes in post-mortem brain tissue to increase understanding of disease-specific astrocyte dysfunction in frontotemporal dementia.