London: £9M funding agreed for two major new clinical research units

Press release from Imperial College London

Partnership of Royal Brompton & Harefield and Imperial College London to lead new developments in heart and lung research

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has announced that a four-year grant worth at least £9 million has been awarded to the partnership of Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust and Imperial College London to fund respiratory and cardiac Biomedical Research Units (BRUs) at the Trust.  The Units will lead innovative research in respiratory and cardiovascular medicine, translating advances in medical research into benefits for patients and supporting the expansion of current research output in these priority areas of disease.

The Respiratory BRU will take the form of an Advanced Lung Disease Unit which will provide clinical core facilities to speed up translation of current therapies into benefits for patients, create six new Consortia in key advanced lung diseases to produce a significant step-change in future research capacity, and focus translational research towards the common endpoint of these advanced lung diseases, namely chronic lung failure. The six new Consortia are: severe COPD; asthma; chronic suppurative lung disease; sleep medicine; acute respiratory failure; and interstitial lung disease.

The Cardiovascular BRU, a Cardiac Regeneration Unit, will research into new treatments for the heart using genes, stem cells, tissue engineering and devices. A significant part of the research will be the establishment of cardiovascular genetics research working in close synergy with advanced cardiac imaging and cardiac Positron Emission Tomography (PET). This will develop a pipeline of discovery of new mechanisms of heart disease and new treatments. The imaging technologies will also be used to develop new techniques of delivering novel treatments (such as stem cells).

Commenting on the news, Bob Bell, chief executive of Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust, said: “I am extremely pleased to see our research expertise recognised by this significant commitment from the National Institute for Health Research. As the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK, responsible for many important developments in both cardiac and respiratory medicine, we are ideally placed to use this investment to support world-class research to the benefit of patients everywhere.

“Our patients know we give them the best possible treatment for their heart or lung conditions; this funding guarantees that the primary focus of our experts in these new Units will be discovering groundbreaking new ways of treating heart and lung disease, so the best possible treatment continuously improves.”

Professor Stephen Smith, Principal of the Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, commented: “We welcome this recognition of the quality of respiratory and cardiovascular clinical science at Imperial College, and look forward to working in close partnership with our colleagues at Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals and with our own Trust to translate our discoveries into better healthcare for patients across west London.”