Research Projects

• Project dates: From September 2012 to August 2017
• Project leader: Professor Kate Bushby/Professor Volker Straub
• Sponsors: Jain Foundation

The “Clinical Outcome Study for Dysferlinopathy” is anticipated to begin in mid-2012 in centres in Europe (UK, Spain, Germany, Italy and France), USA, Japan and Australia. The aim of this “Clinical Outcome Study” is to determine the clinical outcome measures required for future clinical trials, characterize the disease progression of dysferlinopathy and collect biological samples for the identification of disease markers that are needed to non-invasively monitor the disease during clinical trials. Without this information, effective clinical trials cannot be performed.

Staff Profile: Professor Volker Straub and Professor Kate Bushby.

• Project leader: Professor Volker Straub

• Project leader: Dr Chris Petkov
• Staff: Dr. Quoc Vuong; Ben Wilson
• Sponsors: Funded by: Wellcome Trust Project Application 2008

This is a Wellcome Trust funded project aiming to reveal the nature of the evolutionary precursors to the human brain regions supporting language-related abilities. Our hypothesis is that although the brain regions supporting speech and language comprehension are in certain ways unique to humans, these regions evolved from neural substrates that more generically support auditory and cross-sensory perception. This project will use MRI to study the function, structure and connectivity of the brains of adults during syntactic processing related to language and relate this information to that from our comparative MRI work at the Institute of Neuroscience. This combined effort aims to reveal the generic function of the language regions in the human brain and to better understand their functional abilities at the neuronal level with reference to a model system.

Staff profile: Dr Chris Petkov, Dr. Quoc Vuon, Ben Wilson