Congratulations to Angelika Zarkali (ACNR’s Conference News Editor), and Mathieu Bourdenx, who have both been awarded UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowships!
Angelika Zarkali, Senior Research Fellow and Honorary Consultant Neurologist at UCL Dementia Research Centre, Queen Square Institute of Neurology, has been awarded a fellowship worth £2.3 million to explore new treatment approaches for people living with Parkinson’s dementia.
Over the next four years, Dr Zarkali’s team will use multimodal neuroimaging techniques in different populations of people with Parkinson’s disease, to identify circuits responsible for Parkinson’s dementia, and apply novel non-invasive ultrasound stimulation on those circuits to improve cognition.
By combining multiple sources of information from large numbers of people with Parkinson’s, researchers will be able to select the best target for non-invasive stimulation of these brain circuits. The team will then apply ultrasound simulation to this target in 50 people with Parkinson’s. The researchers will use MR imaging to assess the effect of ultrasound stimulation on brain function and neurotransmitter levels short-term (immediately after stimulation) and long-term, after three months.
Together, these experiments will establish optimal non-invasive stimulation targets to improve cognition in Parkinson’s and directly test the efficacy of ultrasound stimulation as a potential treatment. This has potential as a new treatment approach for more widespread use in people with Parkinson’s dementia and other dementias.
Dr Bourdenx’s research aims at understanding how ageing affects the brain while accounting for its phenomenal complexity. He will explore the novel notion that age-related loss of cellular fitness can be defined at a single-cell level using state-of-the-art methods from the field of spatial biology. Preliminary observations indicate that brain cell populations age at different rates, defining vulnerable populations (“fast” ageing) and resilient populations (“slow” ageing). Of interest, these vulnerable populations largely overlap with the ones known to be affected in neurodegenerative diseases. The long-term goal of this project is to understand the diversity of brain ageing to identify resilience factors and design new therapies for ageing-related brain neurodegenerative disorders.
Find out more about their exciting projects: https://lnkd.in/eidU3Jxr
