Colm Cunningham MD, PhD

Dr. Cunningham’s interests lie particularly in how systemic insults such as infection, inflammation and injury interact with, and influence, ongoing neurodegeneration and associated brain inflammation. He also has an ongoing interest in sickness behavior responses induced by bacterial and viral infections/mimetics and the observation of an exaggeration of these responses in animals/persons with ongoing brain inflammation. This has brought 2 of his major interests together: Such responses in the aged or demented incorporate episodes of delirium, a phenomenon that remains unexplained and which now represents a major research interest.

Dr. Cunningham was recently awarded a Wellcome Trust Fellowship to develop animal models of delirium during dementia and maintains long-standing collaborations, with the department of Experimental Psychology in Oxford University and the CNS inflammation group in the University of Southampton, exploring some of these issues. Collectively, these avenues are aimed at moving towards defining the role of activated microglia in prion disease, Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis, while considering the impact of systemic infections on these neurodegenerative diseases.