What we do
Dementia and Neurodegeneration was identified as one of the key healthcare missions in the 2021 Life Sciences Vision.
Dementia is the leading cause of death in England and one in two people will be directly affected by it – either they will care for someone with the condition, develop it themselves, or both. It also has a high social cost, with around £34.7 billion a year currently spent on healthcare, social care and informal care. Annual costs are predicted to rise to over £94 billion by 2040.
On 14 August 2022, the Prime Minister launched the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission, along with £95 million of funding. There is now up to £120 million committed funding to the Mission.
The Mission aims to speed up the development of new treatments for dementia and neurodegenerative conditions. On the 20 March 2023 we announced the appointment of two Co-Chairs of the Mission, Hilary Evans-Newton (CEO of Alzheimer’s Research UK) and Nadeem Sarwar (Co-Founder and Head – Transformational Prevention Unit at Novo Nordisk). The Mission will work across the sector, with industry, academia, the NHS and other UK and global initiatives by developing innovations in biomarkers, data and digital sciences, and increasing the number and speed of clinical trials in dementia.
In July 2023, Innovate UK launched an SBRI Innovation Competition, supported by £6 million of government funding, which has provided funding to ten projects to accelerate innovations in dementia biomarker detection to transform clinical trials and precision therapies. These technologies can be used as clinical tools to enable the biomarker guided development of transformative dementia therapies. The winners were announced on 20 March 2024.
In the Autumn Statement in November 2023, the government announced up to £20 million of additional funding for the launch of a Clinical Trials Delivery Accelerator (CTDA) focused on Dementia. This will be delivered by the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Mission and the Medical Research Council (MRC), tying in with the work of the NIHR Dementia Translational Research Collaboration’s Trial Network and other key initiatives. The Dementia Trials Accelerator aims to embed more innovation in how clinical trials are designed and delivered in order to increase the speed and quality, while driving down the cost of large-scale trials.
In March 2024, the government hosted a roundtable and reception at No.10 Downing Street where charities, academics, investors, business leaders and people with lived experience came together to further accelerate efforts to tackle this devastating illness and to thank all those involved in supporting dementia research, including charities right across the UK.
At this event government made a series of announcements including:
- The appointment of Scott Mitchell as the People’s Champion for the Dementia Mission.
- The appointment of Ruth McKernan as Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Neurodegeneration Initiative.
- The appointment of the Medicines Discovery Catapult as the delivery partner for the establishment of the Neurodegeneration Initiative.
- The award of a share of £6 million funding to ten projects through Innovate UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI) dementia biomarker tools competition (described above).
In July 2024, Innovate UK awarded four UK companies a share of £4.8 million funding through Contracts for Innovation to support innovative research into dementia diagnosis as part of the Mission. The funding will enable organisations to evaluate blood-based and digital biomarkers as part of the Bio-Hermes-002 study, an international study led by the Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation® (GAP).
Further information about these announcements can be found in the links at the bottom of this page.