KCHC-AR-2023 Final Signed - Flipbook - Page 23
Better treatments and care for more people
Reducing the risk of sight loss
£15k
Professor Timothy Jackson has
also used deep learning models
to accurately predict when diabetic
retinopathy (DR), a disease in which the
retina becomes damaged by raised blood sugar
levels, would lead to a loss of vision up to three years
in the future.
The original study used retinal images and data from
the southeast London DR screening service and our
grant will now enable Professor Jackson's team to
test his findings against a different geographic group.
Once evaluated against a broader population base,
these findings have the potential to reduce the risk of
sight loss for the four million people who undergo DR
screening across the UK every year.
Improving outcomes for
epilepsy patients
Image: This is an artificially generated left eye retinal photograph,
extrapolated from characteristics of over 70,000 retinal images.
Inputting the left eye retinal photograph to the program, the
team can generate a “score” for the risk of referrable retinopathy,
maculopathy, or either, over a time frame of one, two or three years.
£80k
Thanks to the Charles Sykes Memorial
Fund, we were able to support several
pioneering studies and developments in this vital area.
Working towards a novel
therapy to treat the most
common primary liver cancer
Our funding will enable Dr Joel Winston, Senior
Lecturer in Clinical Neurophysiology, and his team to
help clinicians understand how thought processes
interact with different regions of the brain to make the
electrical signatures of epilepsy more or less likely to
be seen with a standard EEG (electroencephalogram)
test, aiming to make testing more rapid and accurate.
It will also enable the team to build a new database
for digitised EEG recordings performed at King’s,
facilitating Big Data approaches to EEG analysis.
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the
most common type of primary liver cancer, accounting
for 85% to 90% of cases. We are supporting Dr Tengfei
Si to build on existing research undertaken by the
team that indicates that Mucosal Associated Invariant
T (MAIT) cells have huge potential in anti-tumour
immunity but that this function is impaired in the HCC
environment.
We are also supporting research into NORSE, a rare
but devastating condition affecting previously healthy
schoolchildren and young adults. Neurologist Dr Laura
Mantoan Ritter is aiming to expand the possibilities
for therapeutic approaches for this condition, which
currently lacks effective treatment or clear consensus
for patient management.
In a separate project, we are seeking to support
Professor Deb Pal and his team to contribute to the
development of new treatment approaches for patients
with drug-resistant epilepsy.
£49k
His research objective is to further define MAIT cell
function, to understand why they lose their ability
to attack tumour cells, and how their anti-tumour
function can be re-established.
The eventual goal is to explore whether MAIT cells can
become a possible novel therapy to treat HCC, which
would ultimately improve the prognosis and therefore
quality of life of HCC patients at King’s as well as
contributing to the wider knowledge base in the field of
liver cancer research.
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