In this special episode, recorded to mark UCL's 200th birthday and released on World Alzheimer's Day, three UCL researchers working at very different ends of dementia research come together to talk about what the university has contributed, and where the field goes next.
Professor Selina Wray hosts, joined by Dr Aygun Badalova, a neuropsychologist working on digital neurorehabilitation at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, Professor Tammaryn Lashley, Professor of Neuroscience and past president of the British Neuropathological Society, and Professor Andre Altmann, Professor of Biomedical Data Science and AI, who leads the COMBINE Lab.
Their three approaches could hardly be further apart. Aygun works with people living with dementia and a therapy app built around photographs of the people who matter to them. Tammaryn works with donated post-mortem brain tissue and the pathology that no scan can yet see. Andre works with datasets large enough to assemble a disease timeline nobody has lived long enough to observe directly. The conversation moves between all three, taking in why no two brains with the same diagnosis look the same, what blood-based biomarkers can and cannot tell us yet, where non-drug interventions sit alongside the new anti-amyloid treatments, and what it actually takes to hold that breadth of work inside a single institution.
This year's World Alzheimer's Month campaign is built around the idea that the earlier you know, the more you can do, and diagnosis runs through much of the discussion. Along the way there are some UCL landmarks worth knowing about, including the 23rd letter in a pile of replies to an Alzheimer's Society newsletter appeal and what it set in motion, Sea Hero Quest, the Lancet Commission's modifiable risk factors, the tau gene silencing trial, Insight 46, and the UK DRI. The episode closes on what each guest hopes we will find strange about dementia research by the time UCL turns 220.
In this episode:
- What two hundred years of UCL has actually contributed to dementia research, told through three very different kinds of work rather than a roll call.
- Why each of the guests has stayed, and what their research would have lost elsewhere, from Queen Square Brain Bank and three thousand characterised brains to the Hawkes Institute sitting alongside the Dementia Research Centre.
- How the full pipeline in one institution changes the questions people ask, with cells, tissue and clinic from the same individual, and neurologists now bringing cases to the lab rather than the other way round.
- Where UCL has changed the field, including letter number 23 and the Jennings family, Sea Hero Quest, the Lancet Commission risk factors, TREM2, the tau gene silencing trial, Insight 46 and the UK DRI.
- Diagnosis as the theme of World Alzheimer's Day, and what still stands in the way, from co-pathologies that no blood test can yet see to deciding who is suited to the new treatments.
- What none of this can do inside one building, and why rare dementias, genetic risk and a therapy app all depend on people well beyond UCL.
- Why disease modification and support for people living with dementia today are answering different questions, and the case for funding both.
- What the guests want to look strange by UCL's 220th birthday, and what they are asking listeners to do now.
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A transcript of this show, links and show notes and profile on all our guests are available on our website at https://www.dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk.
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