Living human brain tissue exposed to Alzheimer’s protein in ‘world first’
A British research team has successfully exposed healthy brain tissue from living people to a toxic form of a protein that’s linked to Alzheimer’s disease (taken from people who died from the disease), to show how it damages connections between brain cells in real time in what has been described as a ‘world first’.
The research, funded by The James Dyson Foundation and Race Against Dementia, is being led by Dr Claire Durrant, a Race Against Dementia fellow and UK Dementia Research Institute emerging leader at the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Dr Durrant and her team are working with neurosurgeons removing brain tumours at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh to gain, with patient’s consent, tiny fragments of healthy brain tissue (removed as a necessity during their surgery and that would otherwise be discarded) to experiment on.
Watch a film about the processes the brain tissue undergoes and what scientists are learning here: https://www.itv.com/news/2025-04-30/scientists-discover-how-alzheimers-protein-causes-damage-to-the-brain
Find out more about the Dyson RAD Dementia Research Acceleration Project here: https://www.dyson.co.uk/discover/archive/2021/dyson-race-against-dementia-partnership