Heart research at Imperial boosted by major £8.9 million award

British Heart Foundation establishes Centre of Research Excellence at Imperial College - News

By Laura Gallagher
Friday 4 April 2008

Finding innovative ways to prevent, diagnose and treat heart and circulatory disease is the focus of a new Centre of Research Excellence at Imperial College, established today through an 8.9 million GBP award from the British Heart Foundation (BHF).

Over 2.6 million people in the UK live with coronary heart disease and almost a million with heart failure.

Medical researchers, scientists and engineers from 20 different disciplines at Imperial will join forces in its new Centre, creating pioneering partnerships in order to find novel approaches to understanding and preventing heart problems.

Imperial's clinical researchers will trial new therapies for heart disease and collaborate with geneticists and cell biologists, who are exploring the genes involved in heart disease. Geneticists will team up with computer scientists to analyse the wealth of new data available and biochemists will collaborate with engineers studying the mechanics of blood flow, to design new ways to diagnose and treat heart disease.

Imperial's six-year award will support new interdisciplinary research and training programme, including a PhD training programme for 27 engineers, medical students and bioscientists. The College will also be recruiting 14 post-doctoral fellows and eight specialist registrars.

The BHF hopes that within the lifetime of the award, highly trained researchers will leave the Centre to establish new research groups focusing on heart disease.

Imperial is one of four BHF Centres for Research Excellence, with others based at King's College London and the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford. The BHF hopes that there will be new medicines and therapies resulting from research at the new Centres of Excellence within a decade.

The new award will support a new interdisciplinary research and training programme, including a PhD training programme for 27 engineers, medical students and bioscientists

Professor Michael Schneider, Director of the new Centre and Head of Cardiovascular Science at Imperial College, said: "I am ecstatic about the award. At Imperial, the BHF Centre can be described best as a triangular alliance among cardiovascular medicine, the underpinning biomedical sciences like genetics and stem cell biology, and leading-edge research in the physical sciences such as chemical biology, computational biology and bioengineering. This partnership will have payback in many ways, some sooner than others."

Professor Peter Weissberg, Medical Director at the BHF added: "Many of the advances in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease available today are the result of past research undertaken in the UK. The BHF Centres of Research Excellence will ensure that the UK retains its world leading edge and that UK patients are the first to benefit. This investment will create a new generation of world-class researchers to lead the fight against heart disease over the coming decades."

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