Cambridge researchers are leading drug discovery to develop safer, more effective treatments for the millions of people affected by Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.
According to Alzheimer’s Research UK, if nothing changes one in two of us will be affected by dementia in our lifetime, either by caring for someone with the condition, developing it ourselves, or worse, both. David Harrison is no exception: his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease several years ago – and he sees the effects of dementia on a regular basis.
Harrison says many pharmaceutical companies have lost confidence in working in this area because the risk of failure is too great.
“In the past, drug companies put a lot of money and effort into finding treatments for dementia,” he says, “but we’re talking about a range of really complex diseases and there’s been a high, and costly, failure rate in clinical trials and drug development. While there are new drugs coming out, which offer great hope for patients, they're not ideal and we need to find better ones.”
This is where ‘academic drug discovery’ steps in. With professional and personal motivations driving him, Harrison - a senior researcher at Cambridge’s ALBORADA Drug Discovery Institute – is part of a team dedicated to finding new dementia medicines. The Institute is part of the University of Cambridge, funded by Alzheimer’s Research UK, and based on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.