The National Institute of Health Research funding has been given to a team from Addenbrooke’s Hospital and the University of Cambridge. Scientists have been awarded £800,000 to develop a bedside machine which would give hospital doctors images of their patients’ brains. The money will be spent on technology for brain injury patients. As well as creating a bedside brain imaging device, the team wants to make an iPad app to detect memory problems. The university-hospital partnership is called the Cambridge Brain Injury Healthcare Technology Cooperative (HTC).

The cooperative hopes the bedside machine will give doctors high quality images of their patients’ brains. Such images are currently only available at a handful of centres in the world. Professor John Pickard, director of the Cambridge Brain Injury HTC, said the partnership would be working with patients and carers as well as some of the technology sector businesses based in and around Cambridge. Other projects planned during the next two years includes developing a machine which reliably detects seizures and a system for better tracking of brain injury patients when they leave hospital.

December 2012

Alemtuzumab reduces disease activity in previously untreated patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. We aimed to assess efficacy and safety of alemtuzumab compared with interferon beta 1a in patients who have relapsed despite first-line treatment. Our work has led to the licensing of Alemtuzumab in the European Union and Mexico as a first line treatment for active relapsing- remitting multiple sclerosis, with second line licences in Canada and Australia. In work not supported by commercial funding we have shown that the principal adverse effect of alemtazumab, secondary autoimmunity, occurs when the immune system reconstitute by homeostatic proliferation of residual lymphocytes.

In head injury, we have documented fMRI connectivity in brain regions based on motor and cognitive tasks, providing endpoints that can be used as biomarkers of plasticity in interventional studies.  Rigorous evaluation of 1H MRS and diffusion tensor MRI, including test-retest reliability has been used both in healthy volunteers and TBI, with estimation of sample size in experimental medicine and Phase IIa studies. Applying monitoring of brain chemistry, oxygenation and intracranial pressure as part of standard care of patients with acute brain injury in neuro-critical care has shown relationships between monitored parameters and clinical outcome. This work continues to define the impact of specific therapy on cerebral chemistry. We have completed the NIHR-HTA funded RAIN study – a prospective validation of risk prediction models for adult patients with head injury – and applied this to evaluate the optimum location and comparative costs of neurocritical care. Data from the Trauma and Audit Research Network for 2013 show Cambridge achieving excellent performance of adjusted outcome measures. In multiple sclerosis, we have replicated our finding that serum IL-21 is a reliable biomarker for autoimmunity after alemtuzumab although not detectable using all commercially-available assays.

March 2014