During my work experience with Lancaster University's Philanthropy, Alumni and Supporter Engagement team, I spent time learning about the different ways donations help students, researchers and the wider University community.

After exploring Lancaster’s fundraising priorities and the projects supporters can fund, I was asked a simple question:

If I had £1 million to donate, where would I choose to invest it?

Every year, over 10 million people are diagnosed with dementia, meaning a new person is diagnosed with the devastating disease every 3.2 seconds. That is 10 million more people affected by a disease for which there is no current treatment. But that could change – with stronger funding into research areas, new information about how to treat and prevent dementia can and will be discovered. That is the goal of Defying Dementia, and it needs all our support.

I first heard about the cause when I was walking through Lancaster city centre and came across a charity shop that supports the Defying Dementia campaign, and it intrigued me to learn more.

During my placement at Lancaster University, I began to research the campaign and the work that it does to better understand dementia and how researchers are working towards developing new treatments. The Defying Dementia campaign has been supporting research at Lancaster University since 2015 and has received amazing support – the charity shop alone shop has raised over £100,000 which has gone directly into funding research at the University. However, this is only the beginning – the project needs greater funding and more aid. Donations play a crucial role in developing new insights into how dementia could be treated and one day, prevented.

Research at Lancaster University is helping to develop a promising new potential treatment discovered by Professor David Allsop, who was one of the first neuroscientists to discover the link between amyloid plaques in the brain and Alzheimer’s disease – the treatment is designed to dissolve toxic protein clumps that cause damage to brain cells in Alzheimer’s. This groundbreaking research has opened the possibility of developing a treatment for one of the most devastating diseases to humans. Several of my friends' grandparents have suffered from dementia and have lost their loved ones to a slow and heartbreaking death; with this unprecedented exploration into such a treatment, this reality could be changed. Professor Allsop’s pioneering discoveries have shaped the research that the Defying Dementia campaign supports, even after his passing in 2021, and continues to support new cures for Alzheimer’s.

However, this treatment could not be possible without donations. Funding makes these discoveries possible, and supports the development of treatments, such as the one previously mentioned. As I looked into the campaign during my time on placement at Lancaster University, I wanted to explore what the impact of large donations on research would be. This made me wonder- what would the impact of a £1 million donation have on Defying Dementia’s research?

A donation of this size could significantly support the campaign and fund the laboratories that are crucial to enabling developments in research. More advanced technology can therefore be used to investigate more complex processes and increase the precision of data collected from these experiments, which enhances the likelihood of finding a cure sooner. Furthermore, the latest technology can be used to predict and analyse data at a more complex level than ever before, resulting in more groundbreaking discoveries that allow insights into how Alzheimer’s can be treated and even prevented.

A donation of that size does not just have technological impacts, but it also creates opportunities and benefits for the wider community. It creates hope within the community, for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and those who care for them, which is a common occurrence in both the UK and globally – in 2020, over 55 million people had been diagnosed with dementia, a number that is set to reach 78 million by 2030 and 139 million by 2050. These staggering facts highlight how vital it is for the funding of research into Alzheimer’s disease and show just how many people within the worldwide community would be affected by such findings and research.

I chose to this campaign to research because I believe that Alzheimer’s needs more funding research overall, but especially within my local community at Defying Dementia. I know many people whose loved ones suffer with dementia, and how hard it is to care for them – seeing this made me want to investigate how large funding affects research, and how Defying Dementia supports researchers who work to better understand the disease and develop new treatments.

Sofia Cotton

Year 10 Work Placement Student

Lancaster Girls Grammar School