research

Main Focus of current Research

I am currently a Research Fellow at the School of Life Sciences, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom. My current project is to identify ncRNA-based biomarkers in the serum of MND patients. 

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or motor neuron disease (ALS/MND) is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the motor neurons, causing them to die resulting in muscle death that causes paralysis. In the UK, there is a lifetime risk of 1 in 300, and patients have an average life expectancy of three years following diagnosis, with there currently being no cure for the disease. While about 10% of cases have clear genetic causes, most cases are sporadic with no clear underlying cause. As such, diagnosis of the disease and determining the prognosis is difficult. As such, biological markers of the disease, or biomarkers, are increasingly needed to help with this. 

We are currently seeking to identify such biomarkers in the serum of MND patients to see whether we can use them to help aid diagnosis, predict prognosis, and track disease progression. We are particularly interested in a class of molecules called non-coding RNA (ncRNA) which are relatively stable in blood and have been shown previously to be useful indicators of diseases such as cancer. Our early results suggest that there are changes in ncRNA in patients compared to healthy people and that we could use to identify people with MND. More recently, we have expanded this work to look at how these ncRNA change across time with disease progression and to seek those that not only change to help us have objective markers for disease progression, but those that don't change that predict disease prognosis. 

This work is currently being undertaken at the University of Sussex with grants funded by the Motor Neurone Disease Association and My Name'5 Doddie Foundation.