Research Assistant Translational Neuroscience

Company description:

We are a world class research-intensive university. We deliver teaching and learning of the highest quality. We play a leading role in economic, social and cultural development of the North East of England. Attracting and retaining high-calibre people is fundamental to our continued success.

Job description:

The Role

We are looking to recruit a motivated researcher interested in an exciting multi-disciplinary translational neuroscience project funded by the Motor Neuron Disease Scotland charity with the aim of developing a rapid, sensitive and entirely non-invasive diagnostic test for this disease.

You will join a multi-disciplinary team of neuroscientists, MR physicists, neuroradiologists and computer scientists and will be primarily responsible for overseeing a multi-centre trial of a novel MRI-based diagnostic test for motor neuron disease (MND).

Motor neurone disease (MND) - also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) - is a rapidly disabling and fatal neurodegenerative disease affecting 1 in 10,000. The disease affects people at all ages, but more commonly affects individuals in their 50s and 60s. It is characterised by progressive, painless muscle wasting and weakness, which ultimately leads to immobility, respiratory failure and death. Underlying this devastating condition is the progressive loss of skeletal motor units (a single motor axon and all of the muscle fibres that this innervates). Current diagnostic tests are invasive, relatively insensitive, and available only in larger centres, meaning that patients still typically wait up to 12 months to get a diagnosis. This matters because it delays access to life-prolonging treatments and prevents early recruitment of patients to clinical trials of new therapies.

Our group has recently patented a novel method of imaging human motor units using a variation of diffusion-weighted MRI. We call this motor unit MRI or MUMRI, and are the only group in the world currently developing this technology. We have used MUMRI to study the earliest signs of motor unit dysfunction in MND patients and have already translated this to our local NHS hospital's scanners.

The aim of this project is to build on this work to develop and test methods of detecting both early and late disease stages in the same scan session, thereby creating a rapid, sensitive and entirely non-invasive diagnostic test for MND.

You will help to obtain the necessary regulatory approvals for these studies, arrange visits to collaborating centres, liaise with local teams to ensure participants are being recruited and data is being transferred, aid in the analysis of these data, re-imburse participants for travel and accommodation, prepare, collate and archive study documents and provide reports to the funder.

This post is Part time 0.1 FTE fixed term for a period until 06/07/2025.

For informal enquiries contact: Professor Roger Whittaker r.whittaker@ncl.ac.uk

Find out more about the Faculty of Medical Sciences here:
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/medical-sciences/

Find out more about our Research Institutes here:
https://www.ncl.ac.uk/medical-sciences/research/institutes/

As part of our commitment to career development for research colleagues, the University has developed 3 levels of research role profiles. These profiles set out firstly the generic competences and responsibilities expected of role holders at each level and secondly the general qualifications and experiences needed for entry at a particular level.

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