UK DRI — UK Dementia Research Institute
Overview
The UK Dementia Research Institute is the UK’s leading research institute dedicated to neurodegenerative disease, established in 2017 as the single largest investment in dementia research in UK history (£290M). Funded principally by the Medical Research Council, Alzheimer’s Society, and Alzheimer’s Research UK, it operates across nine centres hosted at leading UK universities: UCL (Hub), Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, King’s College London, and the University of Surrey, with additional centres for Care Research & Technology, Vascular Dementia Research, and Parkinson’s Research. It has more than 750 researchers.
UK DRI is a founding member of the CURE-ND alliance alongside DZNE, Mission Lucidity, and Paris Brain Institute.
Open Science Initiatives
FAIR Data Sharing Policy
UK DRI published a formal FAIR-aligned Data Sharing Policy in 2025, mandating:
- Data release no later than publication or 24 months after data generation.
- Deposit in established public repositories listed in re3data.
- FAIR-compliant metadata and documentation.
- A dedicated Data Science and Informatics Team to support compliance.
- An Informatics Steering Committee and Data Working Groups for standards development.
- An annual Computational Reproducibility Prize recognising researchers producing the most reproducible and openly shared computational work.
Open Code
UK DRI maintains an active GitHub organisation with open-source pipelines including GWAS and QTL summary statistics standardisation and quality control, fine-mapping pipelines, single-cell transcriptomics analysis for Parkinson’s disease, and digital health data ingestion tools for IoT, behavioural, and physiological data.
JPND Participation
UK DRI actively participates in JPND (Joint Programme Neurodegenerative Disease Research), the primary European transnational funding framework for neurodegeneration. UK DRI also participates in the COEN (Centres of Excellence in Neurodegeneration) network, aligned with the JPND framework.
HDR UK Membership
UK DRI is a member of the UK Health Data Research Alliance (HDR UK), enabling access to national NHS health data at scale.
Dementias Platform UK (DPUK)
UK DRI researchers access the Dementias Platform UK (DPUK), an MRC-funded platform providing access to 2M+ individuals across 40+ longitudinal cohort studies, with substantial overlap with UK Biobank data.