The BRC has just awarded over £5 million to 6 high impact experimental medicine initiatives.
Funding, which was on condition of having clear plans for engaging with industry and leverage of other funding, was for high impact initiatives able to demonstrate tangible benefits in the coming four years.
The following awards were made
- £1.0m over 4 years Professor Chris Boshoff to recruit translational and drug development researcher Professor Bart Vanhaesebroeck, who has made key discoveries about the functions of PI3-kinase pathway in disease.
- £1.2m over 3 years to Professor Ashley Groves to set up a GMP Radiochemistry Laboratory for First in Man Studies to enable first in man studies at UCLH/UCL. The lab will bring together biologists, chemists, imagers, engineers and physicists and clinicians.
- £0.3m over 4 years to Professor Harry Hemingway to recruit a clinical lead to develop a biomedical informatics platform at UCLH/UCL that is linked across early and late stages of translation and across BRC disease programme areas.
- £0.7m over 3 years to Professor Aroon Hingorani to develop a linked population and bioinformatic resource for genome-based drug target and biomarker prioritisation for human disease.
- £0.7m over 4 years to Professor Seb Ourselin to establish a BRC Computational Imaging Infrastructure that will develop common software analysis platforms linking the imaging platforms across UCLH/UCL and provide state of the art open source software libraries for the development of medical imaging processing systems.
- £0.7m over 4 years to Professor Sir John Tooke, plus up to £0.6m for three exemplar projects, to establish UCLH/UCL at the Stevenage BioScience Catalyst so industry-ready UCLH/UCL projects can access the Catalyst’s drug development expertise and facilities.
This funding round was a crucial move in the BRC’s bid to bring about a step change in the experimental medicine portfolio at UCL and UCLH, with greater emphasis on demonstrably improving health and creating wealth.
