I think we got to get started for the next session, I hope you're all fully caffeinated now.
A few stragglers. And so the next talk is going to be given by Elmer O'Brien, who works in science communications for Alzheimer's Research UK.
I think promoting awareness of dementia in the public through the media and also is in charge of funding opportunities for clinicians and scientists.
So she could be your next best friend. So I'll let her get started.
Thank you. Okay. Well, thank you very much for having me here today.
I suppose in a room full of doctors and trainee doctors, as we point out,
that my doctor is a Ph.D. so apologies if I make mistakes with the different training programmes and all the other medical lingo,
which I'm not fully up to speed. But really, I'm here today to we've heard a lot about the clinical side of things.
We've heard, you know, the the toll that dementia takes on families who marry.
And we've heard about the policy.
And I'm here really to try and encourage as many of you as possible to think about doing a bit of academic research to complement your clinical work
and to hopefully give you a bit of a flavour of what clinicians can add to the dementia research efforts that are going on in the UK and globally.
So it won't be any surprise. We've heard this throughout today,
that dementia is a global issue and the current estimates are one hundred 850000 people in the UK are living with dementia.
And that means that there's a huge number of family carers, as we've heard from Marian.
And the impact on both the individual and the family is huge.
Aside from the personal side of things, the impact on the UK economy is also massive.
So 24 billion pounds a year is what the dementia costs.
The UK economy that's more than than cancer and heart disease combined and relevance to you.
One in four hospital beds is is occupied by someone with dementia and two and three people in care homes have dementia.
So this is this is really a massive issue. But dementia research has been drastically under-resourced.
So, like I said, the cost to the economy is huge.
But really funding from the government into schemes that have actively try to help find treatments for dementia have lagged far behind.
So it was a bit of a post caffeine interactive session. Does anyone want to guess how much?
Last year the UK government spent on dementia research, 509 million, 75 million, 55 million or 15 million before age 55 is actually correct.
You're not the right person to answer that. So the 509 million is how much was spent on cancer research?
75 million is how much the Department of Work and Pensions spent on stationery a couple of years ago.
In one year, 55 million is dementia research and 15 million is how much Gareth Bale makes in a year playing for Victoria to think so.
Although we're going to hear from from from later about what the government has
stepped up its dementia research funding through the Medical Research Council,
two huge initiatives. We still have a long way to go to make sure that the amount of assisted in dementia research
is is what's needed and also get as many researchers looking at dementia as possible.
So at the moment, there are six times as many researchers looking into cancer as there are in dementia.
So we need to increase the opportunities there are for scientists made dementia research a more attractive
career prospect by providing funding opportunities and and positions within within academic research.
So what do I mean by saying dementia research? And what I'm going to be focussing on is biomedical research.
That's what Alzheimer's research does.
We UK does we fund biomedical research to find ways to diagnose and ultimately treat, treat the diseases that cause dementia.
And the reason we need this investment is because the the drugs that you'll be familiar with did EPSO River, Stigman, etc, are symptomatic treatments.
So as we as we just heard from from from, from cows, they can shop and think the thinking difficulties arise in dementia,
do do a bit for memory, but they're doing nothing to stop the damage that the diseases that cause dementia are wreaking havoc in the brain.
So that's what we're funding research. It can actually modify the disease process.
Holtze, nerve cell death, protect nerve cells so that we can alter the course of the disease.
Rather than just tackling some aspects of symptoms, why has dementia research lagged behind?
Well, there's a huge amount of stigma surrounding dementia for, you know, for decades,
someone who was displaying symptoms of dementia would have been sectioned, institutionalised.
It was not something that the people talked about. It was there was a huge amount of a lack of understanding.
It was accepted that this was just something that happened when people got older.
And that's not true. Dementia is caused by diseases.
This is not a natural part of ageing. And another huge point is that the brain is incredibly complicated.
We're still really trying to understand how the brain works in in those of us that are healthy, let alone what goes wrong in diseases.
So that's why neuroscience as a whole has traditionally lagged behind other other areas of medical research just due to the complexities involved.
And we want to change that through through more research funding.
So a bit of back to basics for those of you that don't don't remember this from from undergraduate's.
So Alzheimer's has two Hallmark proteins, amyloid plaques and tangles.
And really this slide is to illustrate that we have unhealthy nerve cells.
But working out how to fix them is incredibly complicated. Do we try and destroy the plaques?
Do we try and destroy the tangles? Do we need to destroy both?
Can we destroy both? Do we have these things have anything to do with nerve cells getting getting damaged?
And these are the fundamental questions that researchers are trying to answer when it comes to protecting nerve cells from damage.
But Alzheimer's isn't the full story. Although Alzheimer's is responsible for about two thirds of the cases of dementia that we see in this country.
There's also vascular dementia, which we heard about from Marijan Dementia of Lewy body, which has a lot of parallels with Parkinson's.
They've got the same hallmark biological features manifesting in different symptoms and frontotemporal dementia,
which is really, you know, very often misdiagnosed because the initial symptoms are behavioural changes,
personality changes,
which are often not recognised as dementia when when clinicians are looking out for the more usual symptoms of memory and thinking difficulties.
So the problem is incredibly complex, and that's why we need as many people working on this issue as possible.
And that includes clinicians,
because you can provide that clinical viewpoint that scientists working in a laboratory with a pet and some solutions cannot achieve.
Just by doing that, we need clinicians to be able to share their experiences and to conduct research either
in their day to day practise or taking some time out to to to undergo bodies of work.
So now I'm just going to say a few of the opportunities that are available from Alzheimer's Research UK.
So Alzheimer's Research UK funds more biomedical dementia research in the in the UK than any other charity.
And as I said, we focus on research that takes us closer to ways to better diagnose, prevent and ultimately treat the diseases that cause dementia.
And from the pie chart, you'll see on the other the other on the other side,
the diagnosis issues is a huge one because there are so many different causes of dementia,
each with different symptoms, each with different ways of managing these.
And we really need to better understand these diseases if we're to make more accurate, accurate diagnoses are more timely diagnoses.
So we've got to clinician focussed grant schemes, one of which is the Preparatory Clinical Research Fellowship,
and it's designed for clinicians who are thinking about branching out into academic research.
So it's one year of funding suitable for trainees, old age psychiatrist, neurologists and clinical psychologists.
And the proposals would be written by yourself, although you would have to have the support of a supervisor in an academic institution.
You don't need to have a PhD to do these. These really are to get you on that rung of academic research.
As you can imagine, the more successful applicants will have had a bit of research experience,
either through an integrated degree or doing a project at some point in.
In their training, but that's really because it's you yourselves have to write the proposal and really these
these year long schemes are designed to make sure that you can get the the expertise,
the skills, the sort of scientific background that would then allow you to apply for bigger,
bigger grand schemes and sort of become more and to more into the academic research about the schemes themselves.
Are deadlines for them? Are they're done with medic's in mind.
So they're slightly off kilter from our other grand schemes.
Just say that the application deadlines are fitting in when you will have to be changing jobs and things like that.
So they're designed with with with conditions in mind to hopefully make the processes as smooth as possible.
So to give you a few examples of what to our preparator clinical research fellows do,
we have to at the moment just coming to the end of their years, both in London, actually, Cursi, who's at UCL,
and she's working with people with familial Alzheimer's disease as part of a huge it's a global study she's working part of to look
at connectivity in the brain and what are the earliest changes that we can detect in people with familial Alzheimer's disease,
with the hope that that will be able to be able to extrapolate that out,
to look at what are the initial changes that we need to be looking for in people who have later onset Alzheimer's.
And then Valaria at Imperial is also doing an imaging project where she's looking at pet scanning rather than MRI to
look at the role of inflammation and what part that plays in the progression of Alzheimer's disease and inflammation.
That's a really massive topic at the moment in Alzheimer's has been for quite a few
years now because it was traditionally thought of just your body's response to damage.
But now researchers know a lot more about it and have found that it's intimately connected to the progression of the disease.
So she's developing ways that we can monitor inflammation, look at its changes over the disease course,
look at the changes in inflammation in response to therapy. So then the other TaylorMade scheme for clinicians is clinical research fellowship,
pretty much the same thing as the Proprietary Clinical Research Fellowship, but it's three years of funding.
Again, you don't need to have a PhD to apply for this.
And quite a lot of the time, people, clinicians apply for this and do you at their PhD through this scheme.
So this would provide funding. And again,
the applications would have to be made by yourself in in conjunction with a with a supervisor who is a clinician at a at a at a host university.
And I've got a few of our booklets on our funding opportunity.
So d take one of them and then one of my cards and then you can ring our research team at any time to talk through any project ideas that you have.
Obviously it's not actually the research team in the office that makes the decision.
All of our grants go to Grant Review Board, which is made up of about 15 researchers that scrutinise all of the applications.
And then for these research fellowships, you'd go for interview. But the research team can talk you through.
You know, is that within our remit? Is this the sort of thing that we'd fund and that sort of thing to do?
Don't hesitate to give us a call before starting an application.
So just to give you a few examples of our clinical research fellows and more about why
they decided to to get involved in academic research and so on Alzheimer's Research UK,
we have a blog. It's a public facing blog. And we do this.
And every month we have a science is focussed where we do a little interview with somebody that we fund,
whether it be a clinician or a basic researcher. But actually, I find them quite useful as just examples of career pathways,
because especially in science and I imagine it's the same for the clinicians,
you probably get told you have to do things in certain ways and you have to transition from this to this to the other.
And it's always interesting to read examples of people that perhaps haven't done it
in quite so linear a way just to get ideas about what career paths you could have.
So this is Dr. Jianmin, who works down in South Hampton. And when we asked him, you know, why did you want to get involved in research?
He said that when I'm in the clinic with people with dementia and their families, there isn't a lot we can offer them in terms of medication.
There's plenty we can do to support them. But there are limited treatments and those that do exist don't work for everyone.
I often feel that my hands are tied and I wanted to do something to help try and
develop a greater understanding of these diseases to help find new treatments.
So Jay is now embarked on a three year clinical research fellowship to understand more about dementia of liberties.
And he's actually really interested in the inflammatory side of things.
And can we detect in blood clues that would suggest that someone has dementia of liberties rather than, say,
Alzheimer's or frontotemporal dementia to help improve diagnosis and also help understand more about the disease?
Then we have Pablo Garcia write back.
He works at King's, I believe, and he's working again on the information side of things to try to find some examples.
But it's a really a really hot topic at the moment.
He's looking at more of a genetic side of things so very much based in in the lab rather than doing stuff with patients.
And, you know, his advice was, in a way, you're doing two jobs at the same time.
But I find that research and clinical practise complement each other nicely.
As a clinician, I know that what matters to patients, which helps you focus when doing research.
I find it very inspiring and humbling as a researcher to meet the patients that are affected by the disorders that we would investigate.
A lot of scientists do not get this insight, and it really motivates you to go back into the lab to do research.
It's a pleasure to be exposed to different worlds. So doing academic research can be a hugely rewarding experience.
And I completely understand medicks are very busy, overworked,
but it's definitely worth thinking about whether this is something that you would like to explore and bear in mind that there are opportunities,
there are funding initiatives that will allow you to to make that transition and to to do this alongside of clinical work.
And all of our grant schemes obviously take into account the fact that you you know, you're still having to to work in a clinical setting as well.
So a little further down the line, just to give you an idea that this doesn't have to stop at research fellowships,
clinicians are the principal investigators on some of our biggest grants because
they can provide that clinical insight that perhaps a basic scientist can't.
So INSIGHT 46 is is in a way quite similar to the Whitehall study that we heard about from from past.
But this started at birth.
And this took a group of people that were all born in one week in March in 1946, and they've been followed their entire lives.
And now we're funding some researchers at UCLA to do an imaging study on a subset of these people to understand
the changes that are going on in the brain and help us understand how lifestyle impacts on the brain.
We've also got people working on the possibility of a blood test for Alzheimer's, so Simon Loston,
who works here in Oxford, actually now he's a clinician and you may have heard the stories in the news last summer.
It was now about a blood test for Alzheimer's, wasn't quite that.
It was more blood tests to be able to predict whether someone with mild cognitive impairment was likely to go on to get Alzheimer's,
which has huge implications for recruitment to clinical trials.
But the hope is that by that, by investing in that groundwork,
hopefully this will be worked up into a test that can be used more widely in a clinical setting.
But what about basic biology? I know a lot of medicks at least the ones I live with were a bit terrified.
I was a biochemist. The thought of going into a lab and doing stuff.
But there are opportunities for medicks to get involved in the basic biology, not just the the clinical setting.
So here in Oxford, actually, we have a tradition is working on a drug discovery project for dementedly bodies.
So he's doing basic biochemistry, cell biology in a dish.
So you don't just have to use your expertise with patients.
You can also use the fact that you're incredibly bright people to do lab work on the bench setting as well.
So just as an example of some of the big initiatives that we're funding that are more
at that that that basic biology or translational level rather than than in people,
we're funding a stem cell research centre at the University of Cambridge.
And this is really fascinating biology.
And it's it's really interesting how, you know, when I was doing my undergraduate, these techniques didn't exist.
And now they're being used by researchers all around the world.
And this was Nobel prise winning stuff, the discovery that you could take patients skin cells and turn them into stem cells.
And now researchers are using these to basically stimulate the the patient's stem cells to become nerve cells in a dish so we can look at in a dish,
basically the time course of Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, blueberries, wherever these skin cells have come from.
And this will allow us not only to understand the molecular processes that are going on,
but also to be able to screen huge amounts of drugs in a quicker and easier manner.
So that's a huge area of research that's going on at the moment that a lot of people are involved.
And we'll hear more about that, I think, from DPI can.
We've also got a Drug Discovery Alliance, which is three drug discovery institutes, one here in Oxford, one in Cambridge and one at UCLA.
And that's really to make sure that all this interesting stuff that's going on in
academic research labs up and down the country doesn't stay in academic research labs.
I think researchers often have a tendency to get very focussed in on one one protein
in one signalling pathway and then think once they once they found out what it does,
job done. We want to encourage them to get their targets to these drug discovery institutes to make sure then that medicinal chemists,
biologists can take them, design drugs and and basically start early phase drug discovery for Alzheimer's and other causes of dementia.
So we launched the this year. And so it's going to be really exciting to see the progress that these will make.
And again, this can't just be about people in the lab. We need clinical expertise to make sure that people on the right track,
that we're really tackling the the the key issues that are important in the clinic.
At more the clinical phase, we've also launched a clinical trials fund,
and this will fund phase one and phase two clinical trials to basically get, again, academic projects off the ground.
Phase three trials are hugely expensive. So this is out of our reach for the moment.
But the hope is by getting them started, then that will mean there's more leverage for funding from from pharma, from from other funding bodies.
We also have the Alzheimer's Research UK Research Network, and a lot of you come from all over the country and hopefully the networks continue, you,
the research network basically aims to unite biomedical dementia researchers
across the country because often there'll be someone struggling with a problem,
for example, in Oxford and those people in Newcastle that are actually experts in a particular technique.
The aim is to bring people of different backgrounds together.
So that might be, you know, bioengineers working with biologists, working with clinicians to solve certain problems.
And, yeah, there's the list of the centres along the along the side there.
And if you go if you're in Oxford, the network coordinator is Richard Waed Martin.
So you can email him if you'd like to get involved.
But if you go on our website, there's a list of all the other network coordinators if you'd like to get involved in your your local centre.
And and really, I mean, these provide money for pump priming projects.
So pump priming project is basically small amounts of cash to get an idea off the ground.
So often when people want to be able to test the hypothesis, there may not be money left on on a grant that they're working on.
This provides a bit of extra cash for them to gather pilot data that you can go on to to apply for bigger amounts of money.
But I think mainly for you, if you're not working in research,
there's still a huge amount of benefit to the network because this science days, public engagement opportunities.
And I think if you do have an interest in research, it's really good to be able to go along to those here, what's happening in your local centre.
So that can hopefully help you in your day to day jobs in the ward.
Just to have a bit more of a background about what what research is going on near,
you also were always after clinicians for our public engagement activities because because you basically speak to people all day,
often a lot better of explaining stuff to them than others.
So definitely get involved in your local networks and if you're interested.
So how can we help you? Well, aside from providing you money, hopefully we can also provide you with a lot of resources that you might find
useful to be able to pass into the way of the people you come into contact with.
So we produce health information, which is accredited by the information standard,
and these are basically booklets on each of the different causes of dementia.
But as well, you know, key themes such as genetics risk frequently asked questions.
We disseminate these for free to all memory clinics, GP surgeries and libraries across the UK.
Obviously, some of you won't necessarily fall into those categories.
So if you would like some of these just to be able to give out to families, patients, just to have a role where you're working, just give us a call.
They are Wilfred's. They will be more than happy to send as many as you need out.
We can also help with fielding difficult enquiries about research, which,
as you are all very busy in dementia, may not be the only thing you have to deal with.
You might not know all of the research that's going on.
So we've all seen headlines like this recently, more concerning the one about Alzheimer's transmissible.
So I work in the press team at Alzheimer's Research UK and we're constantly reacting to news stories like this, providing comments,
which means that we read all the papers behind all of these headlines and we have a dementia research info line.
So if you ever do get asked queries because, you know,
you're seeing people they've seen on the front page of the Express that morning about chocolate,
pomegranates, coconut oil, you can always pass them our number.
And we'll be happy to explain the science that's going on behind that,
because there is so much out there in the media and it's great to raise awareness,
but always it comes with the the negative side that people can get unnecessarily
concerned or perhaps change their diet and when that's not necessarily warranted.
So do feel free to pass people away. This one's about how can we help you and how can you help us?
So join dementia research launched in February this year.
And it's an initiative from the National Institutes of Health Research.
And the aim is to get as many people as possible involved in clinical research.
There's no point US funding clinicians to do research if there's nobody to take part in those studies.
Since it launched, over 11000 people have already signed up.
And there's all kinds of studies from, you know, Internet questionnaires about lifestyle all the way up to,
you know, brain scans to follow people over a number of years.
We need lots of people to sign up for this. So whether you're interested in getting involved in research and you need people to.
Part in your studies or whether you're just coming into contact with people with dementia and their families on a day to day basis,
do you give joint dementia research to plug? Because we need as many people as possible to get involved.
So I suppose the low points out this morning is not so much the obvious dementia research as a huge challenge,
but there are also lots of opportunities. So while Alzheimer's Research UK and the government focus on increased investment,
increased research capacity and providing the infrastructure, which we're going to hear more about now,
we also need clinicians for your viewpoints, your new ideas, and also encouraging as many people as possible to take part in clinical research.
So that's it for me. I'm happy to answer questions now, or you can drop me an email if you don't pay.