Universities in €14.6m Alzheimer’s research
Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG) are teaming up with pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) on the programme. They will be enlisting the help of hundreds of Irish people to try and identify early indicators.
“We will be working over the next five years to identify markers in people which could help in the development of treatments to slow down the disease,” explained lead investigator, Professor Shane O’Mara of TCD’s Institute of Neuroscience.
Enterprise Trade and Employment Minister Micheál Martin, who announced the IDA Ireland-supported project yesterday, said it would raise Ireland’s international profile in new medical discoveries.
The most common way of identifying the onset of Alzheimer’s involves a series of simple word matching tests, with diminished ability in these indicating the disease or other dementia.
But the TCD-NUIG work will combine these behavioural measures with comparisons of electronic activity in the brain and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), between people with Alzheimer’s, those with mild cognitive impairment and people who have aged successfully.
“There are few if any studies of this scale where all three measurements are combined to identify the differences between those with dementia in different scales and people with no difficulties. We will carry out up to 10 studies with 20 to 30 people involved in each,” said Prof O’Meara.
The aim is that, by identifying the factors that indicate the possible development of Alzheimer’s, GSK will be able to develop pharmaceutical therapies to slow or restrict those factors.
“I can’t say we’ll be able to cure the disease in five or 10 years‚ time, but what could be developed is a set of standard tests that could be administered to people in their 50s or early 60s which would help predict their chances of getting Alzheimer’s,” he said.
The project will involve 22 medical professionals, PhD students and post doctoral scientists and will more than double GSK’s academic research spending in this country. It began a €13.7 million project at University College Cork’s Alimentary Pharmabiotic Centre last year to research gastrointestinal diseases.
The company employs more than 1,600 people in Cork, Dublin and Waterford, and its 600-worker manufacturing plant in Currabinny, Co Cork will also be closely involved.
