Lead by Professor Russell Dale, the Clinical Neuroimmunology group is a team of clinicians, scientists, and bioinformaticians aiming to understand how children develop neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs). By understanding how these disorders start in the brain, we can develop specialised treatment strategies that optimise brain development and improve the lives of children with NDDs.

NDDs, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), and tic disorders, including Tourette syndrome (TS), affect 1 in 10 children, and this prevalence is rising rapidly. A limited understanding of these NDDs has meant that there are no disease-modifying treatments available. This means that alongside long waiting times for diagnosis assessments, parents are presented with treatments that only target the symptoms of these disorders, rather than the underlying mechanisms. Our team want to change this.

Our work uses a range of techniques, including transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, functional immune assays, and bioinformatics to help us understand how NDDs occur in children and the mechanisms by which common therapeutics may be modifying the pathophysiology of these disorders.

 Objectives

• Improve how we assess family history, infection and immune history, and current neurodevelopmental and behavioural symptoms, through standardised digital tools.
• Characterise the causes and triggers of NDDs, with a specific focus on environmental risk factors, such as infection and stress.
• Explore disease mechanisms in the pathophysiology of NDDs, particularly immune and epigenetic processes.
• Identify biomarkers and signatures of disease to enable earlier screening and detection of NDDs, and thereby earlier intervention to improve developmental outcomes in these children.
• Investigate novel immunomodulatory treatments as therapeutic options to improve outcomes for children when conventional treatment fails.