We won't stop until we find à cure for Alzheimer's

I differentiate between the dad in my head and the one in front of me. It'd be almost funny if it wasn't so tragic

- EMMELINE SAUNDERS

Mum-of-two Hayley with her father Tony

Pioneering doctors working on the front line of research into dementia have hope there will be a cure in our lifetime, thanks to their groundbreaking studies.

Fawlty Towers legend Prunella Scales, who died this week, was one of the nearly one million people in the UK affected by dementia, with Alzheimer's disease being the biggest cause.

But it is not a normal part of ageing, despite its prevalence in the elderly population, something neuroscientist Dr Cara Croft is keen to stress.

A scientist at the Queen Mary University of London's Blizard Institute, she is working relentlessly to find effective treatments.

She says: "Dementia and the diseases that cause dementia are a massive problem to society. At one point, I was thinking of becoming a clinical doctor, but I didn't want to say to patients, 'Sorry, you've got a disease that causes dementia but there's not really anything we can do for you'.

"Going down the science route instead, I feel that we can make waves and not have patients worry they only have so many more years left of normality.

"I wouldn't be researching Alzheimer's if I didn't believe we can find treatments to slow, cure or prevent this disease in our lifetimes."

Cara and her team - PhD students Miranda Colman, Daniel Birtles and Gabriela Da Cruz Meda, and lab technicians Abhiram Chakka and Mia Bovis - have been awarded five years of funding by the Alzheimer's Society to test 10 drugs that could lead to a cure for dementia.

They are working on brain slice cultures - growing human skin cells into miniature "brains" inside incubators, then using specialist equipment to monitor a protein called tau that is essential for the structural stability of their nerve cells.