More than 20,000 volunteers have been recruited to a resource aimed at speeding up the development of much-needed dementia drugs. The cohort will enable scientists in universities and industry to involve healthy individuals who may be at increased risk of dementia in clinical trials to test whether new drugs can slow the decline in various brain functions including memory and delay the onset of dementia.
Cambridge scientists have created a comprehensive tool for predicting an individual’s risk of developing prostate cancer, which they say could help ensure that those men at greatest risk will receive the appropriate testing while reducing unnecessary – and potentially invasive – testing for those at very low risk.
Academics from across the University have been recognised in this year’s Vice-Chancellor’s Research Impact and Engagement Awards for their research into improving management of maternity emergencies during COVID-19, helping rural communities in India become agriculturally more sustainable and aiding the Government’s real-time COVID-19 monitoring.
England is on track to have diagnosed 95% of people living with HIV by 2025, putting it in a strong position to eliminate HIV transmission by 2030, say researchers at the MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, and Public Health England (PHE).
Largest study to date analysing more than 40,000 COVID-19 cases finds a two-fold increased risk of hospitalisation from delta versus alpha variant infections.
When Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge upgraded its face masks for staff working on COVID-19 wards to filtering face piece 3 (FFP3) respirators, it saw a dramatic fall – up to 100% – in hospital-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections among these staff.
The annual number of new HIV infections among men who have sex with men in England is likely to have fallen dramatically, from 2,770 in 2013 to 854 in 2018, showing elimination of HIV transmission by 2030 to be within reach – suggests work by researchers from the MRC Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge and Public Health England, published in The Lancet HIV.
Since January this year, Daniela De Angelis and her team have been informing the UK Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Their real-time model of transmission of the virus is helping to track and predict its course as information accumulates over time.
The R number for COVID-19 – the number of people an infected individual passes the virus onto – has risen to above 1 in the North West of England and to 1 in the South West, according to the latest findings published by the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit at the University of Cambridge. When R is greater than or equal to 1, it means transmission will be sustained.
Maria Skoularidou is a PhD candidate in the MRC Biostatistics Unit. Here, she tells us about her work in the emerging field of probabilistic machine learning, meeting 'living legends', and her work supporting and advocating for people with disabilities working in AI.
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