The King’s College London

King’s College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, and a founding college and member institution of the federal University of London. The Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute is one of Europe’s largest centres for interdisciplinary neuroscience excellence. Located at the heart of King’s College London’s Denmark Hill Campus, it’s home to a unique core of neuroscience research.

The Institute is a key research facility in our efforts to fast-track new treatments to patients affected by disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, motor neurone disease, depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy and stroke, while strengthening King’s’ portfolio of internationally recognised brain research.

The 6,500-square-metre Institute brings together 250 clinicians and scientists from many disciplines including: neuroimaging, neurology, psychiatry, genetics, molecular, cellular biology and drug discovery; to advance our understanding of disease mechanisms and develop new therapies for neurological and psychiatric disorders through innovative research.

The Institute fosters collaboration between researchers across multiple disciplines, academic institutions and healthcare organisations to dramatically accelerate the translation of basic research into clinical practice. The Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute is dedicated to advancing our understanding of the molecular, cellular and functional basis of neurological and psychiatric disorders and the discovery, implementation and evaluation of novel diagnostic tools and therapeutic interventions.

We possess an unparalleled patient resource, state-of-the-art facilities and world-renowned researchers and clinicians who will be focusing on three major goals:

• Determining the underlying genetic and environmental risk factors for disease
• Identifying tests for early diagnosis and biomarkers that measure disease progression
• Developing informative cellular and animal disease models of disease to accelerate drug discovery

At the heart of the Institute lies a network of patients, carers, clinicians and researchers, driving forward a shared mission to improve the lives of people who live with devastating and as yet incurable disorders.

Dr Sreedharan is a neurologist with a research interest in TDP-43, a DNA/RNA-binding protein that is dysregulated in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as motor neuron disease, MND) and dementias including frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. TDP-43 levels in the brain are exquisitely regulated in health by autoregulation, but this mechanism is disturbed in disease. The Sreedharan laboratory have developed human cellular and mouse model systems to understand autoregulation with a view to normalising TDP-43 expression for therapeutic gain. They use genetic engineering technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, to create more realistic ‘knock-in’ models of disease than ever before. They also aim to understand the structural, functional and molecular effects of TDP-43 misregulation on brain development, as age-related neurodegenerative diseases probably start much earlier in life than previously thought. For this they use in vivo magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy approaches to appreciate brain structure and function in mice.