UCL academic wins international award for hereditary disease research

Professor Sarah Tabrizi, director of the UCL Huntington's Disease Centre at the UCL Institute of Neurology, has received the 2017 International Leslie Gehry Brenner prize for Innovation in Science. Awarded by the Hereditary Disease Foundation on November 6 in New York, the $100,000 prize is in recognition of "her outstanding contributions to innovative clinical trials and to clinical care for people with Huntington's disease and their families." The award committee commended Professor Tabrizi for her work advancing the mechanistic understanding of Huntington's disease pathobiology and developing novel therapies for Huntington's disease (HD). The prize was donated by architect Frank Gehry and his family, in memory of his daughter Leslie who died of cancer in 2008. Professor Tabrizi co-founded the UCL Huntington's Disease Centre in 2016 with Professor Gillian Bates, who won the Leslie Gehry Brenner Award in 2012 for developing the first mouse model of HD. Professor Tabrizi's research programme seeks to discover effective disease-modifying treatments that prevent or reverse the neurodegenerative process in HD. She leads a research group that follows two distinct but complementary approaches: basic science focusing on cellular mechanisms of neurodegeneration, and a programme to translate those findings into treatments and cures. She and her collaborators have developed means of identifying and measuring the HD gene and its protein in human blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF).