UK-wide partnership to drive stem cell technology in dementia research

Mar 2016: Professor Siddharthan Chandran will lead a new six-centre UK partnership for stem cell research on dementia.

Congratulations to Professor Siddharthan Chandran and colleagues who have been awarded an MRC Partnership Award to  consolidate a highly collaborative and coordinated partnership for dementia research.

A major hurdle to developing new treatments for dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders is the lack of relevant human models in which to study disease mechanisms. Recent technological developments mean that stem cells derived from patient skin biopsies or blood samples can be converted into any cell type, including brain cells such as neurons and glia. This  allows, for the first time, study of the cell processes affected in dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases in human neurons, and has potential in identifying new therapies.

The award will bring together all six UK dementia stem cell research centres in the MRC Dementia Stem Cell Network  to substantially increase the UK’s capacity, productivity and competiveness in dementia stem cell research through the development and application of stem cell technology.

The new partnership will function to facilitate rapid sharing of expertise among the partners and establish common 'gold-standard' protocols, supported and enhanced by a network of highly skilled technical scientists, PhD students and early-career researchers. It will use cutting-edge stem cell technologies to biologically interrogate the unique UK asset of extraordinarily diverse and deeply phenotyped cohorts relevant to the study of dementia, foremost amongst which is the Lothian Birth Cohort (led by Professor Ian Deary, University of Edinburgh).

The Lead Investigators at each site are Siddharthan Chandran (Edinburgh), Nick Allen (Cardiff), Richard Wade-Martins (Oxford), Rick Livesey (Cambridge), Thomas Warner (University College London) and Nigel Hooper (Manchester).