The new institute will be a world class environment in which to conduct research aimed at transforming the lives of patients living with dementia.
- David Rubinsztein
Dementia affects over 830,000 people in the UK and costs the UK economy £23 billion a year. Increasing political focus on improving the outlook for people with dementia in recent years has led to small increases in research funding, but there remains a desperate lack of effective treatments for those with the condition. It has been 12 years since the last treatment for dementia was licensed in the UK and while current treatments help with symptoms, they are only modestly effective and not suitable for all dementias. At the G8 Dementia Summit one year ago, health leaders from across the world pledged a research ambition for a disease-modifying therapy for dementia by 2025.
Alzheimer’s Research UK’s Drug Discovery Alliance will make a major contribution to delivering this ambition – a network of Drug Discovery Institutes dedicated to early stage drug discovery. Each Institute will be led by a Chief Scientific Officer working in tandem with some of the UK’s leading academic researchers based at each of the three universities and Alzheimer’s Research UK’s own in-house research leaders. New ideas and breakthroughs from academic research teams in each university, and beyond, will be driven straight into the hands of dedicated biology and chemistry teams in each Institute, expert in designing and developing potential new medicines.
The Cambridge Drug Discovery Institute will be located on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States, and involves many members of Cambridge Neuroscience, a multidisciplinary network of researchers across the city. Its academic lead will be Professor David Rubinsztein, Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research.
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Image: My Mom's Hands
Credit: Ann Gordon
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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