About the Vera Down award
Through the BMA Foundation, the BMA has supported medical research since 1839 and is the oldest medical organisation in the world to award grants to encourage medical research. The Vera Down grant is dedicated to assist research into neurological disorders.
Summary of research
Dr Rimona Weil’s project will use a multimodal approach to identify markers of disease activity in Dementia with Lewy Bodies. Dementia with Lewy bodies is a common and debilitating form of dementia causing prominent falls, visual hallucinations and slowness of movement. A critical gap is the lack of quantitative metrics of disease activity that will be vital for new clinical trials as they emerge. She will use advanced neuroimaging and blood biomarkers combined with clinical metrics to develop and validate markers for the risk of dementia and quantitative measures of disease activity in DLB. These measures will enable future clinical trials of treatments that could slow the progression of DLB.
“I am thrilled to have been awarded the Vera Down Grant for Neurological diseases from the BMA Foundation. This grant will enable us to work on Dementia with Lewy bodies, and bring together advanced neuroimaging with blood biomarkers to identify much needed metrics of disease activity for this debilitating disease.” Dr Rimona Weil