PhD Studentship – King College London – UK
King College London Provides PhD Studentships For Students To Pursue Studies At UK In 2010
Description:
Whilst much progress has been made in the understanding of dementia and the development of potential therapeutics, this work is hampered both by our difficulty in identifying pre-clinical Alzheimer’s disease pathology and by difficulty in measuring change in pathology in life. Biomarkers might be one way to improve the effectiveness of clinical trials by making early and pre-clinical disease identification possible and by providing a measure of response of pathology to treatment. The best available marker for these purposes is probably PET scanning using Amyloid ligands with CSF measures close behind. But both have drawbacks including logistical difficulties and expense. We have been working to develop blood based biomarkers and have discovered a panel of these which we are further evaluating but think there are more yet to be discovered.
The student will work on one element of these interlinked studies aiming specifically to find markers in blood that are indicative of pathology in brain as measured using PET scans. In collaboration with colleagues at the NIA, Baltimore, the student will have access to samples from a longitudinal cohort with extensive evaluations and replication sets from our own clinical studies and other collaborations. S/he will use gel and gel-free proteomics to discover novel biomarkers and also test existing marker panels including our own using antibody capture multiplexing techniques such as Luminex xMAP. In addition the student will have the possibility of further developing MS based assays using MRM and similar techniques, learning to use multi-variate statistics including class prediction and machine learning algorithms for analysis of complex datasets including protein biomarkers in combination with imaging and whole genome studies and performing experimental validation in animal and other models.The student will join an active research group and will be jointly supervised by Professor Simon Lovestone and Dr Angela Hodges in the UK and Dr Madhav Thambisetty in USA. For further information on this project, please contact simon.lovestone@kcl.ac.uk .
How To Apply:
Email a cover letter, your CV and details of 2 referees, including their email addresses, directly to alison.sharpe@kcl.ac.uk . Please quote ref: “OAP Studentship” in the subject line of your email.
Requirements:
Students must have or expect to obtain, a first class or high upper second-class honours degree in a health science, psychology or related discipline.
Address:
Institute of Psychiatry
King’s College London
De Crespigny Park, London
United Kingdom, SE5 8AF
Last Date To Apply:17:00hrs on Thursday 30th September 2010
Source:http://www.iop.kcl.ac.uk/departments/?locator=1113&context=1442
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