Rosetrees and Race Against Dementia team up to drive out dementia

Photo by Nick Freeman
Photo by Nick Freeman

Six outstanding UK dementia teams funded through new £4.2m programme

Together with Race Against Dementia, Rosetrees is proud to announce funding for six top UK dementia teams researching treatments or ways to prevent dementia.  

70 teams from across the UK applied to the Race Against Dementia Teams Award launched in June 2023. Through a rigorous process the best six teams were selected for the £750k per team award.  

The award aims to provide five years of funding to help build exceptionally talented research teams transform their ideas and accelerate their research. 

In addition to funding these six projects Race Against Dementia, founded by three-time Formula 1 World Champion, Sir Jackie Stewart, will also provide the teams with performance-enhancing training and mentoring used by F1 to get them across the finish line in the race to beat dementia. 

 

Projects awarded through Race Against Dementia – Teams award 2024:

Professor Sonia Gandhi's team (Francis Crick Institute)

Role of Air pollution in Dementia - RAPID

Using new technologies to investigate the role that air pollution has in driving inflammation in the brain and dementia, ultimately identifying new ways to prevent dementia.

Article in The Observer Does air pollution cause dementia? UK scientists launch study to find out | Dementia | The Guardian

Dr Alexander Murley's team (University of Cambridge)

SYNAPSE-FTLD: Design and delivery of clinical trials to treat challenging behaviours in the syndromes associated with frontotemporal lobar degeneration

A clinical trial testing a widely used drug, citalopram, as a new treatment for challenging behavioural symptoms in frontotemporal dementia and related disorders, moving us closer to effective treatments for these devastating conditions. 

 

Dr Richard Killick's team (King's College London)

Alzheimer's and Parkinson's share a common disease process: increasing our understanding of mechanisms, moving us closer to effective treatments

Unravelling the mechanisms of how toxic proteins interact and destroy the all-important connections in the brain in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. Bringing us closer to finding ways to effectively treat, slow and halt both of these devastating diseases.

Professor Joanna Wardlaw's team (University of Edinburgh)

Team Vascular - Prevention and Treatment of Vascular Cognitive Impairment and Dementia.

The team will start studies testing medicines that might help people with vascular dementia. They will study how these medicines work, search for other medicines that might help, and work to speed-up finding better treatments for vascular dementia.

 

Dr Ashwini Oswal's team (University of Oxford)

Improving cognition in Lewy body dementia using focused ultrasound

Using non-invasive brain stimulation (focused ultrasound) to improve memory and attention symptoms in both Parkinson's Disease dementia and dementia with Lewy bodies.

 

Dr Ross Paterson's team (University College London)

Understanding early pathological amyloid and tau deposition in living human brain using stable isotope labeling kinetics

Using new technologies to examine in fine detail the brains of people at high risk of getting Alzheimer's Disease, detecting changes that wouldn't normally be visible and tracking these changes over time. These new insights should open doors to new treatments and tools to detect dementia even before symptoms appear.

 

The six projects are being funded by Race Against Dementia, Rosetrees, Q Charitable Trust and others.

 

Sir Jackie Stewart, OBE said:  

“Formula 1 teams are relentless in their drive to succeed – collaborating to achieve a common goal. It’s a mindset and work ethic we believe can be applied to a team of dementia researchers. I hope these new dementia research teams will speed up progress and get results.” 

Richard Ross, Chairman of Rosetrees, said:  

“Sir Jackie Stewart has very successfully championed Formula 1 racing, and Rosetrees has championed brilliant new medical research ideas. Both are familiar with ‘outside of the box’ approaches to create solutions to difficult problems and this will be a dynamic partnership in the quest for urgent life-changing advances.” 

Jonathan Quin, Q Charitable Trust, Trustee:

“This is a key moment for dementia research. There are finally signs of progress in our understanding, and potentially treatment of, dementia after a period of relative stasis. The Race Against Dementia programme has been a great initiative to encourage the best researchers to come up with new and innovative ways to try and further the recent progress, and we are delighted to be funding one of the six teams.”