Cardiff University awarded £2.7m to host new research cluster for neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disease
19 April 2022
The new research group will be led by Professor Anthony Isles from the Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences.
The MRC National Mouse Genetics Network is a major new £22 million investment in mouse genetics for disease modelling that will capitalise on the UK’s international excellence in the biomedical sciences.
The Network is comprised of seven challenge-led research clusters, with members distributed across the UK. The only cluster in Wales will be based at Cardiff University.
The MURIDAE (Modalities for Understanding, Recording and Integrating Data Across Early life) cluster, led by Professor Anthony Isles at the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University, is receiving ~£2.7million of MRC investment and aims to establish new approaches for studying the early postnatal period in mouse models of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disease.
The key to this will be linking changes in behaviour in early life with changes in brain development through integration of home-cage behavioural monitoring data with measures of brain structure and physiology, all guided by clinical partners to ensure relevance to human disease.
The Mary Lyon Centre at MRC Harwell will act as the central hub of the Network, sharing access to specialist facilities, resources, data, and training with all other Network members, and is receiving £5.5 million to support this role. The partnerships established by the Network will enable integration of basic science research with clinical findings to accelerate our understanding of human disease and translation to patient benefit.
Network Director Owen Sansom said: “We’re excited to announce this first set of research clusters forming the MRC National Mouse Genetics Network and to synergising our efforts to deliver impactful preclinical science through comprehensive sharing of data, resources, and expertise.
“By building connections between researchers working in such diverse fields and through development of comprehensive data-sharing infrastructure, the Network will create a platform that better links mouse genetics research to clinical advances.”
The seven cluster themes are:
- Cancer, led by Prof Karen Blyth at the CRUK Beatson Institute/University of Glasgow and Prof Louis Chesler at the Institute of Cancer Research
- Congenital Anomalies, led by Prof Karen Liu at King’s College London
- Degron Tagging, led by Dr Andrew Wood at the MRC Human Genetics Unit at the University of Edinburgh
- Haem, led by Dr David Kent at the University of York
- Microbiome, led by Prof Fiona Powrie at the University of Oxford
- Mitochondria, led by Dr Robert Pitceathly at the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
- MURIDAE (Modalities for Understanding, Recording and Integrating Data Across Early life), led by Prof Anthony Isles at the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University.
Read more about the MRC National Mouse Genetics Network.
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Professor, Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences
