ALZHEIMER'S SOCIETY

Their core work

Alzheimer's Society is the UK's leading dementia charity, funding research into Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, providing support services to hundreds of thousands of people affected, and campaigning for better care and policy. In the H2020 programme they participated as a third party in two Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks, contributing end-user disease knowledge, clinical perspective, and access to patient communities rather than conducting laboratory work themselves. This role — hosting or advising early-stage researchers — reflects a deliberate strategy to embed disease-relevance and translational awareness into fundamental molecular biology training programmes. Their value to consortia lies not in bench science but in bridging cutting-edge molecular research to the real-world context of dementia patients and caregivers.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects fall within the same year (2017) and run over the same 2017–2021 period, making any meaningful temporal evolution analysis impossible from this data alone. There is no early-versus-recent keyword shift to interpret because there is effectively only one cohort of activity. What can be said is that their entry point into H2020 was through fundamental molecular biology training networks — suggesting an institutional appetite, at that moment, for engaging with early-stage science well upstream of clinical translation.

With only two concurrent projects and no post-2021 H2020 activity visible, no directional trend is detectable — a future collaborator should treat this as a snapshot of one engagement cycle, not an established trajectory.

How they like to work

Alzheimer's Society has exclusively taken third-party roles, meaning they operate outside the formal funding structure of the consortia they join — they contribute in kind (expertise, access, hosting) rather than as budget-holding partners. Despite this light-touch formal role, they reach into large, international consortia: 32 distinct partners across 11 countries from just two projects, which is typical of the sprawling MSCA-ITN format. For a consortium builder, this means they are a low-friction partner to bring in — no complex budget negotiations — but their contribution needs to be scoped clearly around disease context, public engagement, or secondment hosting.

Despite only two projects, their network spans 32 unique partners across 11 countries, reflecting the large multi-node structure of MSCA European Training Networks. No geographic concentration is evident — their connectivity is broad and European-wide by the nature of the ITN format rather than by deliberate bilateral relationship-building.

What sets them apart

Alzheimer's Society is one of very few patient-charity partners operating in the EU research training ecosystem, which gives them a distinctive role that almost no academic or industrial partner can replicate: direct, credible access to patients, caregivers, and public health infrastructure around dementia. For consortia working on molecular tools — gene editing, RNA therapeutics, protein engineering — that aspire to clinical or societal relevance, they provide the end-user anchor that funding agencies value and reviewers reward. No equivalent dementia-specific organisation of their scale and reputation operates in a comparable way within the H2020 third-party model.

Highlights from their portfolio

• MMBio
  A molecular tools network (nucleic acid manipulation for biological intervention) where Alzheimer's Society's presence signals that nucleic-acid-based approaches — such as antisense or siRNA strategies — were being considered with neurodegeneration as an application context.
• ES-Cat
  Directed protein evolution and biocatalysis network; the charity's third-party role here is unusual and suggests interest in enzyme-engineering platforms that could ultimately target disease-associated proteins such as amyloid-processing enzymes.