METABOLIC PHENOTYPING, LIPIDOMICS & BIOINFORMATICS IN DEMENTIA

With
Dr Luke Whiley
Curtin Medical Research Institute,
Western Australia

RESEARCHER PROFILE
Filmed in Perth, Western Australia | February 2026

Dr Luke Whiley is a dementia researcher whose work focuses on understanding how the body’s metabolism, particularly the biology of fats known as lipids, influences our health throughout ageing.

His research explores how the body responds to illness, lifestyle, and environmental stress at a chemical level, and how these responses shape longterm disease risk. Using advanced blood-based measurement technologies, Dr Whiley studies thousands of small molecules at once to build a snapshot of a person’s metabolic health. By combining these measurements with data science approaches, his work identifies biological pathways that become disrupted in disease, providing insight into why some people are more vulnerable to conditions such as dementia.

A major focus of Dr Whiley’s research is Alzheimer’s disease, where he investigates how genetic risk, particularly variations in genes involved in lipid transport,  may affect metabolism across the body and lead to disease. This work highlights the importance of lipids in brain health, helping shift dementia research beyond proteins alone to include broader metabolic processes.

He also studies related questions in Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and COVID19, where metabolic disruption plays a key role in recovery and longterm outcomes. Alongside discovery research, Dr Whiley develops methods that allow detailed metabolic testing using much smaller samples, making future screening and monitoring more accessible.

His overarching goal is to improve understanding, earlier detection, and prevention of neurodegenerative disease, while keeping people with lived experience at the centre of dementia research.

Source: Supplied