Welcome to the Discovery Lab

Dementia is a word used to describe a group of symptoms including memory loss, confusion mood changes and difficulty with day-to-day tasks. Dementia is caused by diseases in the brain and the most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s Research UK is a charity dedicated to defeating dementia and we want to show you what our scientists are up to. Take a journey through our two labs into the clinic and learn about how scientists’ ideas are turned into reality and how this can make a difference for the thousands of people living with dementia.

Start by discovering how our scientists are funded and how they take the first steps to testing out new ideas. This is often called ‘basic research’ but as you will see, it is far from simple! From a 24p test tube to a £100,000 super-resolution microscope, our funding is helping them find the answers.

Explore The Lab by scrolling down with your mouse, arrow keys or the scroll bar on the right of your screen.

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Discovery Lab

Dementia hits the headlines almost every day in the UK and it can be hard to know which stories will endure and which will be lining tomorrow’s chip-wrappers. To judge a story for its true potential, you often need to look through the headline and look in more detail at what the research involved.

While research announcements are made all the time, a large body of evidence is needed before new recommendations are put in place for people with dementia. These changes are not made overnight from the findings of a single study – it can take many years and many studies to build a strong evidence base.

Research in the laboratory studying molecules, genes and cells is vital for helping us understand the diseases that cause dementia, but successes at this stage still face a tough test ahead. While many promising early findings may not make the cut during more advanced testing, it only takes one breakthrough here to change lives in the future.

Over time, finding by finding, we are building a bigger picture of dementia and carrying this knowledge forward to help us find a cure.