The new project, titled RAPID and funded by the charity Race Against Dementia in partnership with Rosetrees, will examine the effect of tiny pollutant particles on the body’s immune response and subsequent disease development.

Air pollution is a known environmental risk factor for a number of diseases including cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Indeed, epidemiological studies have shown an increased proportion of small particle pollutants in the air, is associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s and dementia.

But it remains unclear how this particulate matter alters someone’s risk and drives progression of neurodegenerative disease.

Imran Noorani, Postdoctoral Clinical Fellow at the Crick and Clinical Lecturer in Neurosurgery at UCL, said:

“We want to tackle a major societal challenge - how the environment, specifically the air we breathe, affects the brain and underpins the onset and progression of dementia. We now have the necessary scientific tools and approaches to address this question.”

The RAPID study will build on work led by researchers in the Crick’s Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory. In 2022, they revealed how air pollution can cause lung cancer in people who have never smoked. They showed that exposure to tiny pollution particles causes inflammation in the lungs, which can in turn awaken previously dormant mutations and promote the development of cancer.

Researchers will use a similar approach, focussing on PM2.5, tiny particles around 3% of the width of a human hair. They will work to understand if these particulates induce a brain tissue-specific immune response in mice, and what effect this inflammation has on glia cells in the brain. They will study how these cells react and if pollution-related inflammation may trigger mechanisms that accelerate characteristics of neurodegeneration, including protein misfolding and aggregation, and damage to neurons.

The team also hope that this work will improve our understanding of how neurodegenerative diseases initiate and develop, opening new opportunities for treatment and prevention.

Sonia Gandhi, Crick Assistant Research Director and Head of the Neurodegeneration Biology Laboratory at the Crick and UCL, said:

“A major gap in our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases is how the environment can trigger or drive pathology. This has been previously a difficult challenge to model and study in depth. By discovering the ways in which pollution particles affect the brain, we hope to offer alternative approaches that may ultimately modify the environmental risk of developing brain diseases.”

Charlie Swanton, Crick Deputy Clinical Director and Head of the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory at the Crick and UCL, said:

“Our ambitious program adopts a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together expertise from different scientific and clinical areas. We are aiming to unravel how genetic risk interacts with our environment. Our work in lung cancer has helped shine a light on how air pollution-induced inflammation drives tumourigenesis, and we now want to test the hypothesis that similar inflammatory processes, from the air we breathe, drive the earliest stages of neurogenerative diseases.”

This is part of a new group of projects funded by Race Against Dementia in partnership with Rosetrees, a medical research charity.  Race Against Dementia was founded by three-time Formula 1 World Champion, Sir Jackie Stewart, OBE and raises money to fund global dementia research. Sir Jackie’s wife, Lady Stewart, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia in 2014.

The programme targets high-calibre researchers with outstanding ideas and transformative approaches. Awards of £750,000 over five years can be used to recruit new staff, support current staff, purchase appropriate equipment and research costs.

Sir Jackie Stewart, OBE said:

 “Formula 1 teams are relentless in their drive to succeed – collaborating to achieve a common goal. It’s a mindset and work ethic we believe can be applied to a team of dementia researchers. I hope these new dementia research teams will speed up progress and get results.” 

Richard Ross, Chairman of Rosetrees, said: 

“Sir Jackie Stewart has very successfully championed Formula 1 racing, and Rosetrees has championed brilliant new medical research ideas. Both are familiar with ‘outside of the box’ approaches to create solutions to difficult problems and this will be a dynamic partnership in the quest for urgent life-changing advances.” 

Orgnally shared on external Crick website on 21/10/24