What does the future of brain health research look like?

As well as being the Associate Director for Brain Health at Heath Data Research UK, Professor William Whiteley is also a neurologist at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Director and Stroke Catalyst Theme Lead at the BHF Data Science Centre. Will shares his perspective on what is often described as a challenging area of research.  

Why is brain health research so important right now? 

“Understanding the health of the brain is so important because it has such a major effect on families and people affected. But more broadly, it’s a problem for society. 

“This has major implications on the amount that the economy needs to spend on caring and looking after people. As the population ages, the expense will be significant. So, I think that’s an additional motivation for studying brain health.  

What makes dementia and stroke research particularly challenging? 

“Well, dementia is a particular challenge because our understanding of the disease has only really advanced to create drugs with some effectiveness recently. Finding targets for effective medicines has been difficult. 

“Stroke has been more successful because we know a lot more about the direct cause of the disease. That’s usually a blood clot blocking an artery, which we’ve now got techniques to remove acutely.  

“And we know some of the background factors that will lead to stroke – high blood pressure and high cholesterol – can be reduced with cheap and effective medicines.”

What do you think is most often misunderstood about how brain health research actually works?  

“I believe an important step is to make randomised controlled trials as simple and easy for people to take part in as possible. Trials are needed to make reliable conclusions. 

“In my opinion, the cheaper and the more efficient the trials we offer, the more new medicines that we can test, and the more likely we are to find an effective treatment. It’s about getting more shots on target in my view. And that needs simplicity and efficiency.” 

How do organisations like HDR UK and others ensure that patient data is used safely and responsibly?

“All of us want our health data to be kept as private and as confidential as possible. But there is a balance between making it useful for research. 

“We’ve moved more recently from the days of sharing data directly with researchers from, say, health system computers to other computers, to accessing data only through trusted research environments.  

“And more recently, there’s activities like OpenSAFELY, which is run by a group at the University of Oxford in collaboration with GP software providers. And that’s an additionally safe way of accessing data because the researcher never sees the data directly.”

Looking ahead, are there particular breakthroughs in brain health research that you think data science is hopefully going to help unlock?

“For me, I hope that we can use information from genetics and proteins from blood and other human tissues to find new targets for treatment. That would be fantastic.  

“I hope that we’ll be able to use data from routine healthcare to understand more about people’s experience with conditions like dementia, stroke or other neurological diseases, so that these become more ‘business as usual’ analyses.”

What excites you most about the future of brain health research as data and technology continue to evolve?

“I think we need to know about how useful flexible models and artificial intelligence models will be. How much do they allow me to have expertise in areas where I haven’t trained? And is that reliable?  

“If that’s going to allow me, for example, to have a biochemist in my laptop,
then that’s going to extend the amount of work that I can do. So that kind of Star Trek-like feature would be amazing. We’re not there yet but we’re on the edges of that kind of revolution.” 

Find out more about our brain health and neurodegeneration work at Health Data Research UK.