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Collaborators

Adam Al-Diwani

MA BMBCh DPhil MRCP MRCPsych


NIHR Clinical Lecturer

  • Honorary psychiatry specialist registrar (general and older adult)
  • Tutor Oxford medical school brain and behaviour rotation

Translating neuroimmunology for innovation in clinical research and services

I am a NIHR Clinical Lecturer which means 50% of my time is dedicated to research alongside completing higher training in general and older adult psychiatry.

I focus on drawing lessons from the interactions between the immune system and the brain to better understand mechanisms of psychiatric and cognitive disorders. This can define immune causes, develop new measures of brain function, and derive immune-based treatments. We can also then translate back to how the brain and mind work day-to-day.

During my Wellcome DPhil I made discoveries about how antibodies against the NMDA glutamate receptors are made and the nature of the mental state they cause. This biology has in turn informed treatment choices such as B cell depletion, helped clinicians develop their clinical suspicion for the condition, and driven interest in sampling cervical lymph nodes to measure markers of brain health.

This is of most relevance to understanding vulnerability and resilience to Alzheimer's disease by changes in lymphatic drainage. Supported by an Academy of Medical sciences starter grant and our new ANIMATE study in the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre we will be seeking to integrate lymph node and spinal fluid sampling into translational medicine to offer a brand new perspective on healthy and disordered brain ageing that could further advance prediction of risk, monitoring of treatments, and identify new treatments.

Key publications

Recent publications

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