Dementia research at Exeter gets £190,000 boost!

The dementia research charity BRACE and Kirby Laing Foundation have together awarded more than £190,000 to the University of Exeter Medical School to support cutting-edge genomic research to better understand the causes of dementia.

Kirby Laing has provided £90,000 of funding to support a three-year PhD post in the Complex Disease Epigenetics Group within the Medical School’s world-leading research team that investigates how the way genes are activated influences disease.

Previously, the team has been involved in identifying a number of regions of the genome that are altered in Alzheimer’s disease. Now, the PhD funding, in partnership with BRACE, will allow them to hone in on a specific region, known as HOXA3, and use state-of-the-art techniques to establish how and why this gene is altered in Alzheimer’s disease.

An additional £100,000 of BRACE funding is supporting a two-year project to compare how gene regulation is altered in Alzheimer’s disease compared to in Parkinson’s disease, in collaboration with researchers at Cardiff University, with the aim of identifying unique genes to each dementia.

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