# 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 (https://github.com/UKDRI) 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. ## Connections - Alliance: [[CURE-ND]] - European framework: [[JPND]] - Health data: [[HDR UK]] ## Resources - https://www.ukdri.ac.uk - https://www.ukdri.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2025-03/UK-DRI-Data-Sharing-Policy.pdf - https://github.com/UKDRI - https://www.ukdri.ac.uk/partners/cure-nd