About the Consortium

The Consortium is a large, multidisciplinary team of clinicians, human geneticists, developmental psychologists, mouse geneticists, psychiatrists and cellular scientists, funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Aim of the Project

We are investigating the link between Down syndrome and Alzheimer's disease from the different perspectives of our fields. People with Down syndrome are predisposed to developing Alzheimer's disease and we are working together towards finding out why. We hope that working together, across disciplines, will be mutually beneficial and enrich our findings leading to a better and deeper understanding of why people with Down syndrome are predisposed to develop dementia and what the differences are between people with Down syndrome who do and do not develop dementia in later life.

The project aims to explore the cognitive, genetic and cellular factors underlying individual differences in susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease in both our participants and through the use of mouse models. We are also interested in individual differences in cognitive abilities and brain activity and have designed our assessment battery to encompass all of these objectives.

What we are doing

You can find out more about Down syndrome, Alzheimer's disease in people with Down syndrome and an overview of our work by following the hyperlinks or using the menu bar on the left.

The Consortium comprises five work groups of scientists. To find out about the work of each individual group, follow the links below:

We are predominantly a London-based group involving several of London's top universities.

Our research with adults is based at the Division of Psychiatry, UCL and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London.
Our work with infants is based at the Babylab in the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London
The mouse modelling work is based at the Institute of Neurology, UCL and at The Francis Crick Institute, London
The cellular modelling group is based at the Blizard Institute, Queen Mary's, University of London and now also at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technicological University, Singapore
The genetic analysis we do is also based at the Institute of Neurology, UCL

The LonDownS Consortium is also a part of UCL's Centre for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research (CIDDR). More about CIDDR can be found by using the embedded hyperlink.

Does Down’s syndrome hold the key to cracking Alzheimer’s?

Read this ARUK blog article to find out more about the relationship between Alzheimer disease and Down syndrome!