Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
Edward Wild (neuroscientist)
British neurologist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
Edward Wild, also known as Ed Wild, is a British neurologist and neuroscientist in the field of Huntington's disease and an advocate for scientific outreach to the public.[1] He co-founded the Huntington's research news platform HDBuzz in 2010.[2] He is a professor of neurology at UCL Institute of Neurology and is an associate director of the UCL Huntington's Disease Centre.[3] He is also a consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London.[4]
Remove ads
Career
Summarize
Perspective
Wild studied medicine at Christ's College, Cambridge.[5] In his early career, he studied and published on the neurological phenomenon of déjà vu.[6] He undertook a PhD, supervised by professor Sarah Tabrizi, at the UCL Institute of Neurology, Queen Square, London,[7] during which he published research on biomarkers for Huntington's disease using magnetic resonance imaging measures of brain atrophy[8][9][10][11] and biochemical analysis of blood.[12][13] Wild and Tabrizi continue to work together at the UCL Huntington's Disease Centre.[14]
Wild and colleagues described a novel pathogenic pathway of immune activation in Huntington's[15][16] which later became the basis of clinical trials of immune-targeted therapies.[17] In 2015, he published the first successful detection and quantification of mutant huntingtin protein (the known cause of Huntington's) in human cerebrospinal fluid, using a novel 'single-molecule counting' immunoassay. This finding was noted as a 'research highlight' by Nature Reviews Neurology and won Wild the Huntington Study group 'Insight of the Year' award in 2015.[18][19][20] He has also published novel genetic causes of 'phenocopy' syndromes that mimic Huntington's disease.[21][22]
Wild's research since 2017 has focused on the potential of neurofilament light and mutant huntingtin protein[23][24] as biomarkers for Huntington's disease onset and progression. His work has shown that NFL has better prognostic value in Huntington's disease, but that mutant huntingtin might be a valuable marker for early and sensitive detection of change in clinical huntingtin-lowering trials.[25][24] He was a senior investigator in the clinical programme studying the antisense oligonucleotide tominersen to lower mutant huntingtin production in HD,[26] and gave the first dose of the drug to a patient in 2015.[27][28][29]
He serves on the Medical Advisory Panel of the UK Huntington's Disease Association,[2] the Editorial Board of the Journal of Huntington's Disease,[30] the Association of British Neurologists Neurogenetics Advisory Panel,[31] and the Translational Neurology Panel of the European Academy of Neurology.[32] He is a member of the Executive Committee of the European Huntington's Disease Network[33] and Co-lead facilitator of the Network's Biomarkers Working Group.[34] He is a founder member of the advisory panel to the UK All-party parliamentary group on Huntington's disease.[35][36]
He was promoted to professor of neurology in October 2020, in the UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences.[37] As of September 2022, Wild has authored 7 book chapters[3] and 150 peer-reviewed publications with over 12,000 citations.[38]
Remove ads
Public engagement work
Summarize
Perspective
In 2010, with Jeff Carroll, Wild founded HDBuzz, an online source of accessible news about Huntington's disease research,[39][40] that has received awards from patient advocacy groups.[41] He said he helped establish HDBuzz to provide tempered research news to counter the hype of medical press releases about HD.[42] He has commented that common online opinions that people with Huntington's disease should not be allowed to have children "borders on historical eugenics-type thinking".[43] He has described Huntington's as "the most curable incurable brain disorder" because of the possibility of targeting treatments to its known genetic cause.[44][45]
Wild appeared in the documentary feature film The Inheritance[46][47] and was a judge for the 2015 British Library / Europe PubMed Central 'Access to Understanding' contest for science writers.[48] He has appeared on the BBC Radio Naked Scientists programme.[49] In July 2016, he appeared on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour programme talking about Huntington's disease with Jenni Murray.[50] In December 2017, he appeared on RTE Radio 1 talking about Huntington's disease treatments.[51] In 2020, he appeared in the Ken Burns PBS documentary The Gene: An Intimate History.[52][53]
In 2021, he wrote the afterword of Patient 1,[54] a book by Charlotte Raven about her experiences with Huntington's disease, including her participation on the trial of the experimental drug tominersen.[29] Wild is Raven's doctor and injected her with the first dose of tominersen on the Gen-Peak trial.[29]
Remove ads
Personal life
As of 2021 Wild lived in East London with his partner Joel, a cat and a chihuahua, Riley.[29]
Awards and honours
- 2012 Huntington Society of Canada Community Leadership Award[55]
- 2014 Huntington's Disease Society of America Researcher of the Year Award.[56]
- 2015 Huntington Study Group Insight of the Year (for his CSF mutant huntingtin research).[20]
- 2017 Huntington Study Group Insight of the Year (for the finding that neurofilament light in blood can predict onset and progression of HD).[57]
- 2018 Elected Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.[3]
Remove ads
References
External links
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads