Career
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]
Public engagement work
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]
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