£1.6M MRC award for dementia research

Dr John Danial, based in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of St Andrews, has been awarded a £1.6 million Career Development Award from the Medical Research Council (MRC).  

This competitive grant, awarded through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), will support his research into developing a pan-dementia blood-based diagnostic tool—an important step toward addressing the lack of accessible diagnostics for neurodegenerative diseases, including rare dementias. 

Dr Danial will be working closely with leading experts to develop this tool, including Drs Michel Goedert and Sjors Scheres at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, Professor Jonathan Schott at UCL and UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI), Professor Huw Morris at UCL, and Professor Craig Ritchie at the University of St Andrews School of Medicine, who is also the founder and CEO of Scottish Brain Sciences. 

Recent research using high resolution electron microscopy from the Goedert and Scheres labs has shown that proteins – known as amyloids – in different neurodegenerative diseases assemble into fibrils of different structures. This is a critical finding as it shows that if we can detect the structure of those fibrils in human fluids we can readily diagnose any neurodegenerative disease. 

The tool John will develop will capture amyloid strands in blood and use bespoke fluorescent dyes developed by Amandeep Kaur at Monash University to fingerprint their structures which will be picked up with high resolution microscope to detect and discriminate brain disease. This will help support early diagnosis and provide medical practitioners with the timely information they need to treat neurodegenerative illnesses. 

The MRC Career Development Award is designed to support researchers as they establish their own teams, lead independent research programmes, and contribute to improving human health. John’s project aligns with the MRC’s remit in neurosciences and mental health, aiming to improve the early and accurate diagnosis of multiple forms of dementia. 

Dr Danial said: “I am very pleased to receive this award which will support my group in developing a single accurate blood diagnostic for a wide range of brain diseases, including rare ones that are fatal. The award represents a key milestone for my group in materialising an idea into a tool of transformative impact.” 

John gained his DPhil in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry from the University of Oxford as a Weidenfeld–Louis Dreyfus scholar, supervised by Professor Mark I. Wallace (now at King’s College London). He went on to join Professor Ana Garcia-Saez (now director at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Tübingen. 

He later moved to the University of Cambridge, where he worked with Professor Sir David Klenerman FRS in the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry and the UK DRI, supported by EISAI and the UK DRI. During this time, he also held positions as a College Research Associate at King’s College, Cambridge, and a Bye Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge. 

Now at St Andrews, this prestigious award, one of only nine in the UK this year, marks a significant step in Dr Danial’s career and his work, and promises significant impact on the future of dementia diagnostics.