Welcome to the Department of Clinical Neurosciences.
I am Patrick Chinnery, the Head of the Department.
Our mission is to understand the nervous system in health and disease in order to develop new treatments for incurable neurological disorders.
We are embedded within Cambridge University Hospitals, allowing our research questions to stem from problems we have encountered in the clinic, and to directly address the needs of patients and families. Working in close partnership with the Departments of Psychiatry, Genetics and Paediatrics, we are determining how genetics and the environment interact to cause the major brain diseases that impact childhood to old-age. Our work unravelling the mechanisms of brain disease has led to new treatments which we have tested in the clinic and are now in use world-wide.
Case Study – Head First…
Our major international strengths include;
- Include immunological treatments against brain inflammation including multiple sclerosis,
- Surgical and metabolic interventions to reduce the impact of head injury,
- Understanding the causes and consequences of stroke,
- Preventing the loss of vision and hearing, and
- Developing new treatments to stop neurodegeneration and dementias including Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Case Study – In with the new…
We use innovative cross-cutting technologies that bridge between the laboratory and the clinic, including genetics and genomics to study rare and common neurological diseases, cell biology and human stem cells, model organisms, and state-of-the-art human brain imaging through the Department hosted Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre and the UK Dementia Research Institute centre.
