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DPUK's READ-OUT project, part of the Blood Biomarker Challenge, is set to welcome patients to the first of 28 centres across the UK who are participating in the study.

The multi-million pound award given by Alzheimer’s Society, Alzheimer’s Research UK and the National Institute for Health and Research and Gates Ventures, including £5m raised by players of People’s Postcode Lottery awarded funding to two projects. The second project is based at UCL.  The ambition of the challenge is to revolutionise dementia diagnosis by making it easier and more cost effective to diagnose dementia through a simple blood test. This month, the co-lead for READ-OUT at DPUK, Professor Vanessa Raymont, expects the first patients into the programme at the Warneford Hospital, part of the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust.

The team is looking to identify the best (as well as the most economically effective) ways for accurate dementia diagnosis. It is hoped this crucial work will lead to people accessing vital care and support sooner and more quickly. This is imperative if new treatments are introduced in the NHS as these work best for people in the earliest stage of their disease.

READ-OUT is pooling the collaborative skills of Dementias Platform UK researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. They will test multiple existing and novel blood tests, looking at a range of types of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and dementia with Lewy bodies. The researchers will also look at whether the blood tests can help detect these diseases at various stages.

The biomarker tests could partially replace current diagnostics including memory tests and brain scans. These are less accurate than ‘gold standard’ tests like PET scans or lumbar punctures, which can confirm what type of dementia they have. However, only 2% of people can access these specialist tests.