UK DRI therapeutic aims in diagram

The challenge of dementia demands new concepts, new approaches and a diverse range of new research tools and directions. The UK DRI Centre at Imperial College will play a unique role in realising this within the distributed structure of the UK Dementia Research Institute.

Our goal is to dramatically reduce future instances of dementia by as much as 35% in the next fifteen years.

Professor Paul Matthews

Centre Director and Head of Department of Brain Sciences

Our Centre includes a highly interdisciplinary group of international investigators who are supported by a broad range of expertise and resources across the College, for example, in the MRC London Institute for Medical Sciences, the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, the Centre for Neurotechnology, the EPSRC Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare and the Data Science Institute. Imperial College London was recognised in the last HEFCE Research Excellence Framework for demonstrating the highest impact from its research of any higher educational institution in the UK. Our research will be translated rapidly for improving health outcomes for people with dementia or those at risk which linked directly to care delivery through the Imperial College NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

Foundation programmes in the UK DRI at Imperial have been selected for their innovation, their complementarity to other potential programmes in the UK DRI, and engagement of some of the best scientists in the College across multiple faculties. They all address the transition from vulnerability to the expression of neurodegenerative pathology by exploring individual variation across populations, influences of the gut on the brain, mutual interactions between neurons and glia and roles for homeostatic mechanisms of sleep in pathological processes. They will develop neurotechnologies that will be of wide value, as well as discover new mechanisms, biomarkers and potential novel therapeutic targets or concepts.

We always are seeking new ideas and people. Let us know if you want to join us or contribute in another way.

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