Kinan Muhammed is a FLIER participant and clinical lecturer in neurology at the University of Oxford where he studies motivation and memory in dementia and Parkinson’s disease.
My role is split between clinical neurology, where I deal with a broad range of patients, and academic work which focuses on cognitive neuroscience.
My research interests first started in trying to understand the mechanisms of motivation in neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s disease. While I was working towards my DPhil in this topic, I worked in a lot of memory clinics and regularly met patients who had memory worries. But after they were tested on standard memory assessments, often we would find nothing objectively wrong.
Interestingly, some of these patients eventually went on to develop dementia, but the question I kept asking myself was how can we tell which patients will? And if they are going to develop dementia, is there anything we can do to slow that progression? That experience led me on to a lot of the research that I do now.
I’m really interested in using new technology to understand the underlying mechanics of neurological conditions, particularly neurodegenerative diseases. My view has always been that if we can monitor patients’ cognitive abilities remotely and at frequent time points, it could be useful not only for patients’ treatment and care, but also when it comes to pharmaceutical drug trials.
Working with patients teaches you to ask the right questions about health problems. You can then take that into the academic setting where you try to answer those questions. But my issue has been that you can only go so far with that. My experience of working with industry is that they approach things with an alternative perspective. They can often access and engage with large numbers of people efficiently and at speed. For me, the reason for going on the FLIER programme was to learn more about industry and find out how I could form partnerships between the traditional clinical academic setting and industry to achieve bigger goals.
As part of the FLIER programme, I’m working on two projects related to my academic interests. I’ve partnered with a start-up company to develop a smart phone app for people who are worried about their memory. The app asks them to complete various assessments at home and we can then recommend personalised lifestyle interventions aimed at improving aspects of their cognition and quality of life, and in some cases hopefully reduce their risk of dementia.
The second project is a large collaborative initiative with The Dementia Discovery Fund, a specialist venture capital fund. I have been part of a team working on the idea of remote behavioural testing to be used in clinical dementia drug trials.
At the moment, many new dementia drugs fail to show any benefit according to existing assessments. But the assessments are often outdated and based on subjective questionnaires which are narrow in what they examine. Using broader digital behavioural tests that span multiple cognitive domains means we can create a more fine-grained picture of each patients’ progression. Using this approach, we may find a way to carry out shorter, more informative and less expensive clinical trials.
I’ve been working on this since I started the FLIER programme, and the connections that enabled me to get the project to where it is, and be part of such a large collaborative initiative, were made through the Academy and through FLIER.
I often look ahead at people who are further along in their clinical and academic careers and try and work out if that is where I want to be in the future. At the moment, I haven’t found anyone who fits perfectly in the area that I want to fill, but in a way that may not be a bad thing.
For the future, I hope it will be possible to fund my academic ambitions through partnerships with industry and be able to develop even bigger collaborative projects. I think that would be a great achievement. Learning the skills to be able to set up and lead those collaborative studies is what I hope to take away from the FLIER programme.
For more information on Dr Kinan Muhammed, you can read this profile and follow him on Twitter.
Dr Kinan Muhammed is a participant in Round 1 of the Academy of Medical Sciences’ FLIER Programme, a unique programme that will develop leaders of the future who can create collaborations across academia, industry, the NHS and government to drive innovation.
The FLIER Programme is generously supported by the Dennis and Mireille Gillings Foundation and the Government Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ‘Investment in Research Talent’ fund. If you would like to support the work of the Academy to develop talented researchers, visit our Supporters page.
