Race Against Dementia Dyson Fellow
University of Edinburgh, UK
Dr Claire Durrant studied Natural Sciences and completed her PhD and postdoctoral studies in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. She became a Race Against Dementia Dyson Fellow in 2019. The Fellowship is supported by inventor and engineer, Sir James Dyson, through his charity, the James Dyson Foundation.
Claire specialises in using organotypic cultures and post-mortem human tissue to explore mechanisms of synapse loss in Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders. In 2021, the James Dyson Foundation awarded Claire with an additional £1million of funding to further expand her research and laboratory at Edinburgh.
“Working with Dyson, I am asked questions about my methodology and apparatus that I have not yet considered. People haven’t thought of working in this way because biology and engineering are two disciplines that normally sit on parallel tramlines. I can’t think of any other science scheme where you get access to different people and game-changing resources in the same way that you do in the Race Against Dementia Dyson Fellowship; it’s really phenomenal”
Dr Claire Durrant
Research summary
Dr Durrant’s work investigates the role of tau, a key protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. She is interested in how it keeps the connections between brain cells (called synapses) healthy and how these change in Alzheimer’s disease. Claire believes the tau protein is an important target for future dementia treatments and understanding more about its role in Alzheimer’s disease will be key for the success of this approach.
Dr Durrant is particularly interested in how changes in tau can leave synapses vulnerable to attack from microglia, the resident immune cell in the brain. Dr Durrant uses a toolkit of experimental models, including a novel human brain slice culture technique, that allows processes to be studied in thin slices of living human brain.
Dyson engineers are helping Claire to analyse brain samples on a microscopic level, using in-house equipment and expertise at Dyson’s laboratories in Malmesbury, UK. This approach is normally used for Dyson’s future-focused battery research, and it would have unlikely been applied to brain research were it not for this collaboration.
By working closely with drug discovery researchers, it is hoped Dr Durrant’s work will directly inform the development of therapies for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.
