More than 20,000 volunteers have been recruited to a resource aimed at speeding up the development of much-needed dementia drugs. The cohort will enable scientists in universities and industry to involve healthy individuals who may be at increased risk of dementia in clinical trials to test whether new drugs can slow the decline in various brain functions including memory and delay the onset of dementia.
Using the resource, scientists have already been able to show for the first time that two important bodily mechanisms – inflammation and metabolism – play a role in the decline in brain function as we age.
By 2050, approximately 139 million people are expected to be living with dementia worldwide. In the UK, in 2022, UK Prime Minister launched the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission, part of the government’s commitment to double increase research funding for dementia.
Although there has been recent progress in developing drugs that slow down the progression of the disease, the two leading treatments only have a small effect, and the vast majority of new approaches that work in animal studies fail when it comes to patient clinical trials.
Challenges in Drug Development
One explanation for these failures is that the drugs are tested in people who already have memory loss – and by this point, it may be too late to stop or reverse the disease. Hence, there is an urgent need to understand what is going on before people develop symptoms at the very early stages of disease, and to test new treatments before people come to their doctor with cognitive problems. This approach requires a large cohort of participants willing to be recalled for clinical and experimental studies of cognitive decline.
Today, writing in the journal Nature Medicine, scientists led by the University of Cambridge in partnership with the DOI: 10.1038/s41591-024-02960-5
For further information about how you can join the BioResource and contribute to studies like this one and many others, please visit www.bioresource.nihr.ac.uk.
The research was supported by the Alzheimer’s Society and the NIHR BioResource. The researchers were also supported by Wellcome and the Medical Research Council.