Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London, United Kingdom

Neurology Group, MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith Hospital

[Scientific staff | Publications within DiMI | References]

Group Description

The MRC Clinical Sciences Centre has well established laboratories for carrying out molecular imaging research in humans and animals along with programmes in genomics, proteomics, and immunology. The Cyclotron Building, Hammersmith Hospital, has working groups dealing with PET instrumentation physics, image coregistration, radiochemistry, neurodegenerative diseases, cerebral ischemia, psychiatry, oncology, and gene and stem cell-based therapies. The Cyclotron Building houses three dedicated high-resolution PET scanners (Siemens ECAT HR+, HR++, and 953B), a small animal PET (Siemens CTI), and a quad HIDAC camera. The NMR unit houses 3T human and a 7T animal MRIs (Phillips). The Hammersmith Group, therefore, has all infrastructure necessary to carry out innovative research integrating PET, MRI, and molecular medicine.

The MRC Clinical Sciences Centre plays an essential role in neuroscience research at Imperial College London, translating gene and stem cell therapy into the clinic, phenotyping neurodegenerative disease, investigating new treatment modalities in neurodegenerative disease and therapies in oncology. The MRC CSC has close interactions with the Division of Neuroscience, ICL, which runs disease orientated clinics and provides deep brain stimulation and neuropathology for correlation of PET data with histological findings. The MRC CSC has a close collaboration with the Neurorestoration Programme at Lund University (Olle Lindvall and Anders Bjorklund). It has held an EC Biomed 5 Shared Cost Grant – “Microglial activation in neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease: A therapeutic target?” (£102,090 to this site) Jan 2000 – Dec 2002 and an EC Biomed2 Shared Cost Grant - BMH4-CT95-0341 “Development of a cell transplantation therapy for patients with Parkinson’s Disease” (450,000 ECU) Jan 1996 - June 1999.