Please see below items about BCN finalists and winners of the IoPPN Awards, and news updates from Ahmad Al Khleifat, Antonio Valentin, Anthony Vernon, Deepak Khuperkar, Alessio Delogu, Verity Mclelland, and Sandrine Thuret.
Congratulations to the BCN finalists and winners of the 2025 IoPPN Awards!
Congratulations to BCN 🏅finalists🏅 and 🏆winners🏆 of the IoPPN Awards and selected out of 500 nominations!!!
🏅The Wohl Technical Team: Kate, Krys, David, Arnold, Sven- Outstanding Technical Services Award.
🏅Sam Stewart- Professional Services Education Administration or Research Administration Award.
🏆Brenda Williams- Outstanding contribution to student experience (academic staff) Award.
🏆Professor Ammar Al-Chalabi and King’s MND Care and Research Centre – Collaborative Research Excellence Award (see photo above).
Please see news item link below for further info and pictures:- https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/ioppn-awards-2025
Ahmad Al Khleifat (below) has been elected to the Academic Board for a three year term.
News from Antonio Valentin’s lab
The Valentin lab have published two recent articles in journals (Nature and Cell).
Ji GJ, et al. (2025). A generalized epilepsy network derived from brain abnormalities and deep brain stimulation. Nature Communications, 16(1), 2783. Rey HG, et al. (2025). Lack of context modulation in human single neuron responses in the medial temporal lobe. Cell Reports, 44(1).
News from the Vernon Lab
Anthony Vernon’s lab has recently had two articles published.
A perspective in Nature Mental Health, “ Brain and body energy metabolism and potential for treatment of psychiatric disorders”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44220-025-00422-6
Brain function is critically dependent on energy metabolism. Research over the past half century has provided many insights into energy production and utilization in the brain, and identified ways that it can be improved in brain disorders. A parallel literature indicates that major aberrations exist in brain bioenergetics in neuropsychiatric disorders. Targeting bioenergetic abnormalities may be an efficacious approach to treatment for these conditions. In this Perspective, we provide a survey of the relevant literature on these topics and sketch the outlines of a research agenda to maximize the impact of future research and treatment interventions.
A new review published in JAMA Psychiatry “Current Position and Future Direction of Inflammation i n Neuropsychiatric Disorders” https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2836261?guestaccesskey=31f577b9-87e8-4144-9fe2-e164c2a1c473
In this review led by colleagues at Oxford University, we explore how inflammation in the body may contribute to mental health conditions such as psychosis, depression and autism. In doing so we bring together evidence that assess how increased activity of the immune system may influence brain health and behaviour, review the current clinical trial landscape for novel biologic therapies and emphasise the importance of a unified, cross-disciplinary approach to validate these emerging treatments so they can be brought closer to clinical use.
News from Deepak Khuperkar from the Ruepp lab group, who has been awarded the King’s Prize Fellowship and the Professor Anthony Mellows Medal to develop his research programme which explores how temperature influences RNA regulation in brain health and disease.
Alessio Delogu has been interviewed for the BBC Instant Genius podcast talking about the relationship between sleep and memory.
Spotify link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3cFsqQNzBCcGBl9JCduas7
Verity Mclelland has had the following paper published in Brain Communications.
Tsagkaris S* , McClelland VM* , Fialho D, Lumsden DE, Kaminska M, Guedj E, Hammers A, Lin J-P. Motor and sensory neurophysiology in relation to [18F]FDG PET imaging in children with dystonia. Brain Communications 2025 – in press. * Joint first author.
https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcaf151
The paper is fully open access.
Thuret Lab News Summer 2025
Congratulations to Sahand Farmand for leading on a new research article from the Thuret Lab published in Aging Brain, showing how “Selenium deficiency negatively affects survival and integrity of human hippocampal progenitor cells”. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbas.2025.100138
Congratulations to Gargi Mandal for winning the Best BCN Poster Prize presenting “ Hippocampal neurogenesis and response to ketamine treatment in Depression” and to Sahand Farmand for the Best BCN Talk presenting “ Exercise Alters Neurogenic Markers and Transcriptional Pathways in Human Hippocampal Progenitor Cells” at the 2025 School of Neuroscience PhD symposium.
