The Sigrid Rausing Trust has awarded a gift of £5m to The UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and UK Dementia Research Institute

This gift will fund a Neurogenetic Therapies Programme to build on advances in understanding the genetic basis of neurodegenerative diseases, significantly speeding up their translation into effective treatments.

Sigrid Rausing, Founder and Trustee of the Trust, says: “We were persuaded to make this grant by the references we requested and received from the medical community, which highlighted not only the undoubted expertise of the UCL team, but also, more generally, its collaborative approach to science. Global collaboration and open access should be a given for all publicly funded research, and the same goes for research supported by charitable gifts. Our aim was to support the most effective research into the highly complex syndrome of dementia, and we very much hope that our grant to UCL will help to unravel the mysteries of this most devastating condition.”

The programme will develop and test promising new genetic therapies for neurodegenerative and dementia-causing diseases like Alzheimer’s. This is the first step towards the creation of a dedicated, specialist integrated Centre for Genetic Therapies for Neurodegeneration at UCL, to accelerate the development of novel therapies and run clinical trials as soon as ideas come to fruition.