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HD Centre Labs
- Bates Lab
Professor Gill Bates began her work on Huntington’s disease in 1987 when she joined Hans Lehrach’s laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund as a postdoctoral fellow. The Lehrach lab was at the forefront of developing techniques to identify disease-causing genes and was a member of the international Huntington’s Disease Collaborative Research Group. This comprised six groups in the USA and UK that worked together under the umbrella of the Hereditary Disease Foundation, of which, Nancy Wexler was president. The HD Collaborative Group cloned the HD gene in 1993 and identified the HD mutation as a CAG repeat expansion.
In 1994, Bates established her independent research group at King’s College London (KCL). Her lab published the first mouse models of HD in 1996, which, with Stephen Davies, led to the identification of huntingtin in inclusions in 1997. Bates became Professor of Neurogenetics at KCL in 1998 and Head of the Division of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at KCL in 2011.
In 2016, she moved her lab to the Institute of Neurology at University College London to establish the Huntington’s Disease Centre with Professor Sarah Tabrizi. She is Professor of Molecular Neuroscience at the Institute of Neurology and Co-Director of the Huntington’s Disease Centre.
Bates was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999, the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2002 and the Royal Society in 2007. She was awarded the Royal Society Glaxo Wellcome Award in 1998, the Max Planck Research Award for International Cooperation in 1999 and the Leslie Brenner Gehry Prize for Innovation in Science in 2012 by the Hereditary Disease Foundation, among others.
Bates Lab
Sarah Aldous – Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Nadira Ali – Graduate Research Fellow
Marie Bondulich - Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Maria Canibano-Pico – Research Assistant
Sandra Fienko – Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Rachel Flomen – Research Project Manager
Casandra Gomez-Paredes - Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Zixin Kang – Research Assistant
Christian Landles – Senior Research Fellow
Iulia Nita – Research Assistant
Georgina Osborne - Graduate Research Fellow
Aku Owusu-Afriyie – Research Assistant
Aikaterini-Smaragdi Papadopoulou – Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Jemima Phillips - Graduate Research Fellow
Kirupa Sathasivam - Senior Research Fellow
Edward Smith - Postdoctoral Research Fellow
- Tabrizi Lab
Professor Sarah Tabrizi graduated with first class honours in Biochemistry, then studied medicine at Edinburgh University where she was awarded the 1992 Leslie Gold Medal for the most distinguished medical graduate. During her time as a trainee neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN), Queen Square, Sarah worked for Professors Anita Harding and David Marsden, both of whom would make a lasting impression on her. She undertook an MRC Clinical Training Fellowship PhD studying mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegeneration with Tony Schapira and Gill Bates from 1996-1999, and it was during this time that Sarah developed a passion for Huntington’s disease (HD) research. Sarah obtained a prestigious Department of Health National Clinician Scientist Fellowship at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology in 2002, was promoted to UCL Clinical Senior Lecturer and Honorary Consultant Neurologist in 2003, to Reader in 2007 and Full Professor in 2009. Sarah is Director of the UCL Huntington’s Disease Centre, which she co-founded with Professor Gill Bates in 2016, and Joint Head of Department Neurodegenerative Disease at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology. Since 2003, she has led a highly effective and innovative clinical service for patients and families with Huntington’s disease at the NHNN.
In addition to basic bench science, which focuses on basic cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration in Huntington’s disease (HD), she also leads a large translational research programme in HD that is working towards finding effective disease-modifying treatments. Sarah has published over 300 peer-reviewed publications to date and her research work has been the subject of articles in NEJM, The Economist, Scientific American, and The Lancet. She serves on several panels including the UK HD association, the European HD Network and NINDS/NIH. She co-founded, with Sir Michael Rawlins, the UK All Party Parliamentary Group for HD in 2010. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2017 she received the seventh Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science awarded by the Hereditary Disease Foundation. In 2018 she received the Cotzias Award from the Spanish Society of Neurology and in 2019 she received the Yahr Award at the World Congress for Neurology and the Alexander Morison Medal from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. In 2022, she received the Osler Medal from the Association of Physicians of Great Britain and Ireland, and the MRC Millennium Medal for her outstanding achievements in medical research, including her pioneering work to advance understanding and translation of therapies for neurodegeneration. In 2023 she received the Arvid Carlsson Award from Lund University for her research in Huntington’s disease mechanisms and therapeutics. In 2024 Sarah was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Basic Science Laboratory
Dr Roisin-Ana Ni Charthaigh - Senior Research Technician
Lucy Coupland - Research Assistant
Dr Jasmine Donaldson - Research Fellow
Dr Marwa Elmasri - Senior Research Technician
Dr Ross Ferguson - Research Fellow
Dr Mike Flower - Academic Clinical Lecturer
Dr Florence Gidney - Senior Research Technician
Dr Robert Goold - Research Fellow
Dr Joe Hamilton - Research Fellow
Jessica Olive - Research Assistant
Claire Pimblett - Research Assistant
Dr Freja Sadler - Senior Research Technician
Experimental Medicine and Clinical Trials
Kate Fayer - Research Coordinator
Dr Henrique da Silva Ferrao Nascimento - Clinical Research Fellow
Dr Mitsuko Nakajima - Clinical Research Fellow
Dr Sangeeth Rajagopal - Clinical Research Fellow
Olivia Thackeray - Research Assistant
Wellcome Trust Treat-HD Study
Dr Mena Farag - Clinical Research Fellow
Kate Fayer - Research Coordinator
Dr Nicky Hobbs - Research Fellow
Dr Michela Leocadi - Research Fellow
Dr Michael Murphy - Clinical Research Fellow
Dr Rachael Scahill - Associate Director, Principal Research Fellow, Imaging
Administrative Team
James Behagg - Research Coordinator
Rose Hopkins - Executive Assisant
- Team Wild
Professor Ed Wild is a clinician scientist and Associate Director of UCL Huntington’s Disease Centre, where he has been a Principal Investigator since 2015.
Ed has authored 6 book chapters and over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles. His team has been central to the discovery and validation of numerous biofluid biomarkers for Huntington’s including mutant huntingtin and neurofilament light proteins and has twice been awarded Huntington Study Group Insight of the Year awards.
Ed is the global Chief Investigator of the international HDClarity study, the largest cerebrospinal fluid collection in Huntington’s disease. He is also centrally involved in the design and execution of numerous clinical trial programs including the first antisense oligonucleotide huntingtin-lowering trial (tominersen) and others targeting central mechanisms of Huntington’s disease.
Ed serves on the Medical Advisory Panel of the Huntington’s Disease Association, the Association of British Neurologists Neurogenetics Advisory Panel, and the Translational Neurology Panel of the European Academy of Neurology. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Huntington’s Disease and co-Lead Facilitator of the European Huntington’s Disease Network’s Biomarkers Working Group.
In 2010, he co-founded HDBuzz, an online source of reliable, impartial, easy-to-understand information about HD research. In recognition of this and his research contributions, Ed was awarded the 2012 Community Leadership Award by the Huntington Society of Canada and the 2014 Research Award by the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.
Ed is @ProfEdWild on Twitter.
Team Wild
Fiona Kinsella - Study Research Officer
Dr Opeyemi Kinyomi - Clinical Research Fellow
Dr Gail Owen - Trials Manager
Mara Terres Rodriguez - Study Admin Assistant
Dr Kat Schubert - Study Coordinator
Chloe Young - Study Research Assistant
- Byrne Lab
Dr Lauren Byrne obtained her BSc in Biology at Imperial College London in 2014. During the final year of her BSc, she first discovered Prof. Sarah Tabrizi. Having a strong personal interest in Huntington’s disease (HD), Dr Byrne was immediately inspired. She came to UCL Institute of Neurology with the sole aim to of working within Prof. Tabrizi’s HD research team, and consequently completed an MRes in Translational Neurology in 2015. She successfully carried out an MRes research project in HD, focusing on neuroimaging biomarkers with Diffusion Tensor Imaging. After completing her MRes, Dr Byrne secured a research assistant position with Prof. Ed Wild, establishing and managing a HD biofluid cohort called HD-CSF.
Dr Byrne carried out her PhD thesis under Prof. Wild part-time (2016-2020), focusing on developing biofluid biomarkers for HD. Most notably, her work on neurofilament light protein (NfL) in blood was published in 2017 in the Lancet Neurology and received a ‘HD Insight of the year’ award from the Huntington Study group. During her tenure at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, she was promoted to UCL Research Fellow in 2018, and UCL Senior Research Fellow in 2021. She became the 2019 winner of the HDSA Berman-Topper Postdoctoral Research fellowship. In 2022, Dr Byrne was awarded a prestigious Medical Research Council Career Development Award fellowship and established her independent research team within the UCL HD centre.
In addition to her academic career, Dr Byrne is a committed HD Advocate and family member. She sits on the boards of two HD charities. In her position with the Huntington’s disease Youth organisation, she set up their Research Committee and is leading the Juvenile-onset initiative for HD (JOIN-HD) – the first global registry for JoHD – as Chief Investigator.
The Byrne lab (commonly referred to as House of Byrne) is working on developing at-home biosample collection methods to analyse biomarkers remotely, in particular, blood NfL. Remote assessment measures could improve research uptake and recruitment for populations with many barriers to research participation. The frequent sampling of biomarkers that could be achieve through remote collections may elucidate the natural disease related dynamics of biomarkers. House of Byrne is passionate on facilitating research in Juvenile-onset Huntington’s disease (JoHD) patients, which currently lacks robust outcome measures for clinical trial endpoints.
Keep up to date on the Byrne lab’s latest activities by following it on twitter @houseofbyrne.
Lauren is @LaurenByrne7337 on twitter.
Byrne Lab
Liz Broom - PhD student
Annabelle Coleman - Research Assistant
Joelle Hanson-Baiden - Research Assistant
- Hensman Moss Lab
Dr Davina Hensman Moss graduated with a first class degree in Biological Sciences from University of Oxford before studying Medicine at St George’s University of London, and continued to combine her interest in both science and medicine with a series of NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowships and a Chadburn Lectureship during her clinical training.
Dr Hensman Moss’s Huntington’s disease (HD) journey began in 2012 when she joined Professor Tabrizi’s group as the Clinical Fellow for the Track-On HD study. She became fascinated in why some people with HD progress faster than others, and worked with Professors Douglas Langbehn, Sarah Tabrizi, Lesley Jones and Peter Holmans to identify genetic variants including MSH3 which are associated with multi-domain progression in HD, this work was published in 2017 in The Lancet Neurology. For this work she received a ‘HD Insight of the Year’ award from the Huntington Study Group, the Jean Corsan Prize for the best scientific paper in neurodegeneration published by a PhD student from Alzheimer’s Research UK in 2018.
Her interest extends beyond HD to other diseases caused by repetitive DNA. She was co-first author on a paper which demonstrated that DNA repair gene variants modify onset in polyglutamine spinocerebellar ataxias as well as HD. She also demonstrated that the C9orf72 repeat expansion was the most common genetic cause of Huntington’s phenocopy syndromes. More recently she has been collaborating with Dr Arianna Tucci on a study which demonstrates that repeat expansion mutations are more common than previously thought: occurring in 1 in 283 individuals, and also examined families with large CAG-repeat jumps from the 100,000 genomes cohort.
Dr Hensman Moss returned to UCL in 2024 to lead the Sperm-CAG and DIGG-HD studies. Her group’s work focuses on understanding intergenerational CAG repeat instability by studying sperm: using next generation sequencing methods to quantify repeat variability and then examine factors which influence this.
Dr Hensman Moss enjoys caring for people with both Huntington’s disease and general neurological problems in her clinical work. She is engaged with the HD community, and co-leads the European Huntington’s Disease Network (EHDN) Genetic Modifiers Working Group, and is member of the EHDN Scientific and Bioethics Advisory Committee.
Hensman Moss Lab
Alice Merrall - Research Assistant
Dr Sangeeth Rajagopal - Clinical Research Fellow
Dr Catrin Sohrabi - Clinical Research Fellow
For more information about DIGG-HD please visit our clincal research studies page.
- Scahill Neuroimaging Lab
Dr Rachael Scahill is a Principal Imaging Research Associate and an Associate Director of the HD Centre. She graduated with a degree in Zoology from Jesus College, Oxford. After completing a PhD with Professor Nick Fox at the Dementia Research Centre on the imaging of presymptomatic familial Alzheimer’s Disease, she moved to work with Professor Sarah Tabrizi at the HD Centre in 2008. Here she set up the imaging team who have been responsible for the development of imaging methodologies designed to identify and track brain changes across the spectrum of HD.
Rachael has been responsible for co-ordinating the image analysis for several international multi-site studies – TRACK-HD, TrackOn HD and WIN-HD – providing robust imaging markers of disease which are now being implemented in ongoing clinical trials in HD. The team use a range of imaging modalities – volumetric MRI, diffusion imaging, task and resting state fMRI and multiparametric mapping – and Rachael promotes collaboration with other imaging groups through her role as Co-Chair of the European Huntington’s Disease Network Imaging Working Group. Most recently she has led the HD Young Adult Study which has identified the presence of progressive brain imaging changes more than 20 years before clinical motor onset. It is hoped that these novel findings will facilitate the design of future preventative trials in HD.
Rachael has published five book chapters and over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, most notably in Nature Medicine and the Lancet Neurology. She enjoys teaching and supervising masters and PhD students including providing pastoral support through her role as Research Departmental Graduate Tutor for the Department of Neurodegeneration.
Scahill Neuroimaging Lab:
Dr Nicola Hobbs – Senior Research Associate
Dr Michela Leocadi – Research Associate
Dr Harry Knights – ABN PhD student
Jannath Choudhury – Masters student
Jessica Arissol – Masters student
Alisha Jahangir – Masters student
Please see the Biomedical research page for further information on the Labs
Funding
HD research at University College London (UCL) & National Hospital for Neurology & Neurosurgery (NHNN) is only possible through the generous support of a number of organisations. In turn, some of our funders rely on donations and fund-raising efforts by HD family members and the general public to continue supporting vital HD research. We are grateful to all our funders for their valuable support.
If you would like to give a donation to help HD research and the welfare of HD patients and their families, please consider donating to the essential work of the HD Association.
You may wish to consider a major donation or bequest to fund individual HD research projects or posts directly. Please contact us to discuss this.
Our major funding sources are:
- CHDI Foundation
The CHDI Foundation is a private philanthropic foundation that was established with the mission of bringing together academia, industry, governmental agencies, and other funding organizations in the search for Huntington disease (HD) treatments. The Foundation supports numerous projects related to HD, including basic research, a drug-discovery program, and clinical studies.
- Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is one of the world’s largest biomedical research charities and its mission is to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health.
- Dementia Research Institute
Launched in 2017, the UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) is the single biggest investment the UK has ever made in dementia. The institute carries out research relevant to all dementias, including Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, vascular dementia, Huntington’s disease and beyond.
- Medical Research Council (MRC)
The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) is a national organisation funded by the UK taxpayer. It promotes research into all areas of medical and related science with the aims of improving the health and quality of life of the UK public and contributing to the wealth of the nation.
- National Institute for Heath Research
The goal of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is to create a health research system in which the NHS supports outstanding individuals, working in world class facilities, conducting leading edge research focused on the needs of patients and the public.
- Additional Support
In addition, many departments of University College London support HD research through the provision of technical expertise, office space, laboratory resources, scanners and other support.
These include:
Contact
We cannot give medical advice over the internet or by telephone. If you require such advice, please contact your General Practitioner or call NHS Direct on 111. In an emergency, dial 999.
| Clinical research studies / trials | Kate Fayer |
| 020 3108 7483 | |
| k.fayer@ucl.ac.uk | |
| HD multidisciplinary clinic | Desiree Salanio |
| 020 7679 9549 | |
| desiree.salanio@nhs.net | |
| Fundraising enquries | Rose Hopkins |
| 020 3108 8442 | |
| r.hopkins@ucl.ac.uk |