Funding boost for neurodegenerative diseases research
3 November 2009
These Strategic Awards, which total just under £17 million, will support multidisciplinary collaborations to study Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal dementia and motor neurone disease. It is hoped that the research will improve our understanding of these devastating conditions and, ultimately, lead to improvements in diagnosis and therapies.
Mechanisms of neurotoxicity of amyloid aggregates:
Professor Peter St George-Hyslop at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, University of Cambridge and colleagues from Cambridge, Bristol, Toronto and the Max-Planck Unit for Structural Molecular Biology will use novel methods from physics, chemistry and molecular biology to discover how the accumulation of amyloid beta and tau proteins results in the death of brain cells in Alzheimer's disease and related neurodegenerative disorders.
RNA processing proteins and neurodegeneration - exploring mechanisms and modelling disease:
Professor Christopher Shaw, of the MRC Centre for Neurodegeneration Research, King's College London, and colleagues from King's, Manchester, University of California San Diego, Cambridge and Dundee, plan to model key aspects of motor neurone disease and frontotemporal dementia, including mutations in the genes FUS and TDP43, to explore the mechanisms of disease and identify new therapeutic targets.
A systematic investigation into the pathogenesis and course of Parkinson's syndrome:
Professors Nicholas Wood, John Hardy and Anthony Schapira, Institute of Neurology, University College London, and colleagues at UCL, Dundee and Sheffield, will study Parkinson's disease at its earliest stages. They will examine the genetic basis of Parkinson's, to identify and characterise the biochemical pathways involved.
Image: MRI scan. Credit: Mark Lythgoe and Chloe Hutton