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This week the government announced a new five-year strategy to improve the quality of treatment of dementia in England.

Neil Hunt, chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, was quoted on BBC Online as saying: ‘One million people will develop dementia in the next ten years. This is a momentous opportunity to avert a dementia crisis that could overwhelm the NHS and social care.’

Gordon Wilcock, Professor of Clinical Geratology in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford, chaired one of the major working groups that contributed to the content of the strategy. Professor Wilcock is also Vice President of the Alzheimer’s Society, which ran the various working parties.

I asked him about the strategy and his own work as director of OPTIMA – the Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing.

OxSciBlog: Why do we need a national dementia strategy?
Gordon Wilcock: Dementia has languished behind many other illnesses in terms of a comprehensive strategy to ensure early diagnosis, treatment and support. It is estimated that there are at least 700,000 people in the UK with dementia, and in most cases the effect of their illness has a major impact on their family and those that care for and about them.

The consequences of dementia also make a major demand upon the resources of both the NHS and social service provision. Anything that can reduce this burden of illness will have major benefits not just for patients and their families, but also within the health and social service caring environments.

OSB: What are the challenges ahead in providing high-quality care for people with dementia and their families?
GW: One of the major challenges is the sheer number of people with the condition who need to be assessed and managed. An equally important challenge however is the need to educate people, both lay and professional people, about dementia and the need to do something positive about it. Providing resources for new services in the current economic climate is also going to be challenging. 

OSB: What outcomes will you be looking for as the strategy is implemented?
GW: I would expect to see a steady increase in the number of people assessed and appropriately diagnosed with dementia, and adequate support provided for them and their families. This is a five-year strategy and I would hope that at the end of this period, everyone with dementia will have access to a specialized clinic, to whom GPs can make referrals having themselves better understood the problems of dementia and how to initiate assessment. 

OSB: What are the priorities for OPTIMA?
GW: OPTIMA’s priorities include improving both diagnosis and treatment, and also to increase our understanding of risk factors that contribute to the development of the diseases that cause dementia. We would like to make it possible to diagnose people before they are significantly impaired and offer them new treatments, as these become available, to slow down the rate at which their brain cells fail.

OSB: What are the challenges for research?
GW: The biggest challenge at the moment is developing tests that will identify the disease processes that are going to cause dementia before they have actually done so. There are a lot of new treatments in development, and some in clinical trials, that may slow the disease such that the onset of dementia may be delayed significantly. Identifying people at this early stage is very important.

Dementia research is also exploring new approaches to treatment, based upon the underlying changes in the brain that affect brain cells. Coupled with this, however, is the need to develop tests that will show whether or not a potential new drug is really going to be helpful. This will probably involve more sophisticated use of brain imaging techniques, and also biochemical changes that can be measured in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid.   

You are starving, a prolonged drought means the nearest remaining food lies across miles of desert full of hungry predators ready to gobble you up: what do you do?

If you are a Desert locust you undergo a Jekyll & Hyde style transformation and turn from a shy, solitary individual into a gregarious, swarming migrant.

As reported in (among others) BBC Online, The Times and The Independent scientists including Oxford's Mike Anstey have finally identified the specific changes in the nervous system that affect this transformation: in particular the role of the brain chemical serotonin.

Previous research at Oxford had tracked down the physical stimuli that kick-off the change in lifestyle - a tickle of the locust's back leg was found to be the most powerful stimulus.

Part of Mike's work involved pinpointing the timeframe for the change in locust behaviour - something which happens before a stimulated insect changes body shape and colour. Once that was established the researchers could examine a range of chemicals in locusts to see which ones change as a result of the physical stimulation.

'Surprisingly, the only chemical that increased in the two to four hour timeframe it takes for the locusts to become gregarious was serotonin,' Mike told me. 'Although we had no idea that serotonin would play such a critical role in the process, it makes sense that serotonin is the culprit since it is well-known as a chemical found in the nervous system of other animals (including humans) which mediates behavioural changes towards others.'

In locusts an increase in serotonin causes them to be attracted rather than repelled by other locusts. Essentially the food shortage makes them 'switch' to the sort of safety-in-numbers strategy used by other animals in which a large pack of individuals moving as one confuses predators, enabling them to migrate in greater safety.

So why don't locusts live in swarms all the time?

'Although they are safer than predators they are at high risk of being cannibalised by other members of the swarm, which happens quite often!,' Mike explains. 'Switching to the gregarious phase is really the lesser of two evils - individuals will certainly die of starvation if they do not migrate and are only quite likely to die by migrating.'

The findings are evidence that serotonin is responsible for behavioural changes that occur as a result of interactions with others across a wide range of very different animals: from insects to humans.

Dr Mike Anstey completed the work whilst at Oxford's Department of Zoology. 

In a recent study, Professor Margaret Esiri of the Department of Clinical Neurology set out to try and find changes in a deep part of the human brain that might be associated with autism.

For this she needed brain samples after death from people who had autism, and also from people without. That way she could compare the two groups and look for any differences in the brains in terms of their organisation, changes in cells and their chemistry, or the biological molecules present.

Such differences could shed insight into the causes of autism. However, she was only able to use samples from five people with autism, and only four brains from those without. This wasn’t nearly enough to be able to say if there were any differences. Larger studies would be required to get reliable information.

In the UK, there are only 20 autism brains available for research. That really stops any research like this in its tracks.

‘We need hundreds of brains for research,’ says Professor Esiri. ‘And we also need normal brains for comparison. There is a severe shortage of normal brains for research, particularly from those who died at a young age.’

This situation prompted Professor Esiri and colleagues from other UK universities to appeal for more people to register their desire to donate their brains after death to help research into all kinds of conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease multiple sclerosis, and motor neurone disease.

They held a press briefing in London and the response to all the coverage has been very positive. ‘The science correspondents present at the briefing even came up to us afterwards and asked how they could register,’ says Professor Esiri. ‘Following an article in The Oxford Times, the Lord Mayor of Oxford has also kindly offered to donate her brain after her death.’

I don’t know if all that means you’d be in good company or not, but if you would be interested in donating your own brain for research after your death, Professor Margaret Esiri says you can email her in the first instance at [email protected]

How did things get so bad? Well, there’s no system in the UK for donating normal brains for research. The transplant register is for just that – transplants. And giving your body to medical education helps train would-be doctors, but is not for research.

While other organs can be sampled during life for biopsies and diagnostic tests, that obviously can’t be done for the brain. So there is no general method for obtaining brain samples, as well as a lack of awareness of the problem among doctors and nurses and the general public.

Efforts are being made to redress the problem. The Medical Research Council (MRC) is in the process of setting up a national brain bank network. And in Oxford, the Brain Bank for Autism & Related Developmental Research has recently been established thanks to the work of the charity Autism Speaks UK. This new initiative will form part of the Thomas Willis Oxford Brain Collection, an existing brain bank with samples largely for dementia research.

By providing a rich resource for research in this way, it may be possible to make real strides in understanding the basis for behavioural changes seen in people as dementia progresses and which is such a burden for families to cope with.

Or it might be possible to link up changes seen in brain scans of people with multiple sclerosis while they are alive with biochemical or neurological changes in brain samples after death. Tissue samples will also be important to understand the effect new drugs might have on the pathology of disease.

So medical science needs you. Or at least, it’d be very happy with your brain. 

In this week's Geophysical Research Letters Oxford's Scott Osprey and Giles Barr report how data collected from the MINOS experiment in a disused US iron-mine is shedding light on what's happening 20 miles up in the Earth's stratosphere.

The UK's NCAS and STFC highlighted this new work, I asked Scott and Giles about cosmic rays, climate science and mines...

Oxford Science Blog: Why do we need underground detectors to monitor what's happening in the stratosphere?
Scott Osprey: Paradoxically, the further underground detectors are placed, the better we find correlations between cosmic rays (muons) and stratospheric temperature. This counterintuitive result is a consequence of the very high energy cosmic rays being sensitive to changing conditions in the atmosphere.

Giles Barr: At a more technical level, the cosmic rays start off as protons which interact in the atmosphere to make pions, these then decay to make muons which we can detect. The chain is therefore protons -> pions -> muons. While the cosmic rays are pions, they can interact again which causes them to be lost (they split up in to many lower energy particles which we can't distinguish from background). This possibility of them interacting depends on the temperature.

It turns out, as Scott says, that the higher energy ones (which we can detect most easily by going underground) have the best sensitivity to the temperature, because they have come from pions which interact enough.

OSB: What are the challenges of doing research in a disused iron-mine?
GB: Our hosts at Fermilab and the University of Minnesota have built an underground lab which is spacious, brightly lit, dry and has a flat floor. We have fork-lift trucks, internet access, microwaves and desks down there. The mine professionals who run the operation are really good at their jobs.

When we made the detector, everything had to be designed to fit down the mineshaft, so the steel sheets which the detector was made of were hauled down in strips and then welded together underground. There is no-one there overnight, so the detector is made to stay running without humans around: We have made it so that virtually everything is controllable remotely over the internet, so we can get things going again without having to go down the mine. 

OSB: What is the significance of being able to link an increase in cosmic rays to Sudden Stratospheric Warming?
SO: It better highlights the physical link between cosmic ray muons and the atmosphere by identifying them with other known phenomena occurring in the atmosphere. This gives us confidence that we actually understand the underlying physics. For those interested in other aspects, it adds to our armoury of observations, and potentially gives us a new tool to use.

GB: There are many things which affect cosmic rays on their journey through the galaxy, into the solar system and then the atmosphere.  From the cosmic ray physics point of view, this allows us to check some aspects of this process. 

OSB: How much do we still not understand about the overall impact of cosmic rays on climate?
GB: There are some other groups who are studying the effect that cosmic rays might induce cloud formation, that as the cosmic ray whizzes through bits of the atmosphere its ionisation trail could start droplets off which could then form clouds, but we are not looking into that at all. Our research points out that there is an effect in the opposite 'cause>effect' direction, that the state of the atmosphere affects the number of cosmic rays we see.

SO: These results do not say anything about the possible effects of cosmic rays on climate. Actually, this turns the topic on its head: by highlighting the impact of a changing atmosphere on cosmic rays. However, the 'philosophy' may be relevant for those investigating the possible effects of cosmic-rays on climate: by promoting others to examine environmental effects in the cosmic rays of lower energy, thought relevant to these studies.

OSB: How might further research in this area benefit climate researchers?
GB: The basic physics behind these environmental effects has been known for a long time in the particle physics community. However, very few studying climate will know of these. In the early days of cosmic ray research, in the 1940's and 1950's, there was a need for both meteorologists and particle physicists to work closely together. Since then the communities have diverged somewhat, following the subsequent development of large and powerful 'atom-smashers'.

Recently, certain hot-topics have brought aspects of each others work to the other's attention. Some of this has been met with a mixed reception. However, future work, such as from the NCAS/MINOS collaboration, can only prove beneficial in the long run.

Dr Scott Osprey and Dr Giles Barr are based at Oxford's Department of Physics, Dr Osprey is lead scientist of this study for NCAS, Dr Barr is funded by STFC for his work with MINOS.

In his new book Graham Richards, who recently retired from Oxford where he was Head of Chemistry, tells the story of his involvement in technology transfer, launching the spin-out Oxford Molecular Ltd and his role in the founding of the University's technology transfer company, Oxford University Innovation.

I asked Graham about his 20+ years of experience helping to turn research into business:

OxSciBlog: What one thing could government do to boost the commercialisation of research?
Graham Richards: In the current financial climate raising funds to start - and even more for second round funding - is difficult. Of course everyone thinks that Government funding would solve their particular problem, but spin-out companies offer one of the few attractive ways of helping the country to recover.

We need new industries and new big companies. Spin-outs can provide these and we need lots of new billion pound companies. Relatively small amounts of Government cash would facilitate this and the alternatives of venture capital and the banks no longer exist. Thus a Government investment fund of, say, £100 million could be very effective and even profitable for the taxpayer: perhaps a couple of Googles.

OSB: What was your view of technology transfer before you launched your first spinout?
GR: I was totally ignorant and indeed Oxford Molecular was the first of the modern style spin-outs where the University had equity in return for its intellectual  property, which had then only very recently been given to the University. We very much made it up as we went along, including the division of the equity, which was split one third each to the University, the venture capitalist backers and the founders.

OSB: How have your views changed after two decades of involvement in spinouts?
GR: The University now has, in the shape of Isis Innovation, a very professional technology transfer organisation which can really support the researcher who wants to go down the spin-out route and is prepared to put in the effort. Things are much easier and there are plenty of role models to follow. It is also true that it is no longer so unusual to follow this path.

OSB: What advice would you give scientists considering commercialising their research?
GR: Go to talk to Isis at the earliest possible stage. They will help in almost every way but particularly in the early stage in protecting the intellectual property. Secondly, be prepared to put in some time: it is not trivial. Finally, in general, remain as an academic and get others to run the company. Perhaps the most vital step is finding the initial CEO. The latter will help both with the business plan and also in raising funding.

'Spin-Outs: Creating Businesses from University Intellectual Property' by Graham Richards is published by Harriman House.