WBIC acute brain injury collaborative grant

We use state-of-the-art scanners, and chemical analysis to help us understand what happens when our brains are damaged by accidents, become diseased and decline as we grow older. In order to make new discoveries we must also develop the scanners and the chemistry we do, and as we develop our tools we use these to help us understand better what is happening when we have problems with our brains. Our work will help develop new treatments and medicines which we hope will enable us to treat brain injuries and diseases more effectively.

The proposed programme will be based at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre (WBIC) a component unit of the university Department of Clinical Neurosciences, based at Addenbrooke?s hospital, Cambridge. The centre is a purpose-built facility for structural and functional brain imaging and uniquely in the UK, has both a state-of-the-art positron emission tomography (PET) and MRI imaging facilities. The objective of the programme is to build on this range of multi-modality technology that has been developed at this centre in the last 10 years linked on the original research mission of the WBIC to advance the care of the critically ill patient following acute brain injury from initial ictus through recovery from coma and rehabilitation to final outcome. We aim to develop range of novel PET radiopharmaceuticals, MRI and MRS, microdialysis and proteomics methods designed to advance and enhance the objectives two associated MRC programmes proposals.