£15 million gift launches new Cardiomyopathy Innovation Centre at Imperial

The new centre will enable researchers to better predict disease progression and develop more personalised approaches to care for people with cardiomyopathies.

A £15.24 million gift from the Michael Uren Foundation will enable Imperial's National Heart and Lung Institute (NHLI) to establish the Sir Michael Uren Cardiomyopathy Innovation Centre, bringing together cardiovascular genomics, advanced spatial biology, cutting-edge cardiac MRI, artificial intelligence and patient cohorts in a way that no single existing centre currently can. 

Cardiomyopathies are a diverse group of conditions that affect the heart muscle and are a leading cause of heart failure, sudden cardiac death, and heart transplantation in young and middle-aged adults. Although these conditions affect about 1 in 150 people, clinicians can’t reliably predict who will experience serious complications, whose disease will progress, or which treatments are most likely to benefit individual patients. 

"Our vision is to transform how cardiomyopathy is diagnosed, how risk is predicted and how patients are treated." Professor Michela Noseda

Building on decades of cardiomyopathy research at Imperial and its NHS partners, the Centre will bring together cell biologists, physicists, clinicians and data scientists to address some of the most important unanswered questions in these conditions. By combining detailed molecular information from human heart tissue with advanced imaging, genetic and clinical data from patient cohorts, researchers hope to understand why and how the disease develops and progresses differently from one person to another, explain why patients respond differently to existing treatments, and define new therapeutic targets. 

Over the next five years, researchers will recruit and study people with cardiomyopathies, as well as people carrying genetic variants linked to these conditions who have not yet developed the disease. The team will create one of the most detailed molecular and structural maps of cardiomyopathy ever assembled and develop new imaging biomarkers that could help clinicians better forecast disease progression, understand treatment response, and identify patients most at risk. 

Dr Paz Tayal, Clinical Associate Professor in Cardiology and Consultant Cardiologist, said, “The questions the Centre aims to address are among those that patients and families tell us matter most: why people carrying the same genetic variant can have very different disease trajectories, whether disease progression can be predicted more accurately, and how care can be better tailored to the individual. By bringing together large-scale clinical studies with advanced genetics, imaging and molecular research, we hope to generate the evidence needed to answer those questions and move closer to a future where treatment decisions are guided by the biology driving each patient's disease.” 

The Centre's research will be delivered through three interconnected hubs focused on clinical studies and genetics, advanced spatial biology, and advanced cardiac imaging.  

Professor Michela Noseda, Professor of Cardiovascular Science, said, “To improve outcomes, we need to connect the biological causes of disease with what we see in patients. This Centre enables the development of advanced technologies to bring together genetics, molecular science, imaging and large-scale patient studies. Our vision is to transform how cardiomyopathy is diagnosed, how risk is predicted and how patients are treated.” 

The Sir Michael Uren Cardiomyopathy Innovation Centre has been made possible through a major gift from the Michael Uren Foundation, whose support will establish the Centre and underpin its work over the next five years. Sir Michael Uren (Mechanical Engineering and Motive Power 1943) was an alumnus and longstanding supporter of Imperial. His £40 million gift to establish the Sir Michael Uren Hub at White City was the most generous in Imperial’s history, creating a new centre for biomedical engineering research. Since Sir Michael’s death in 2019, the Foundation has continued his long association with Imperial, most recently supporting the Sir Michael Uren Future Environments Facility at Silwood Park, experimental Alzheimer’s disease research and biomedical engineering research through the MSk Lab, and providing scholarships for PhD students. 

Professor Barbara Casadei, Head of Imperial’s National Heart and Lung Institute, said, “We are deeply grateful to the Michael Uren Foundation for their vision and support. This gift will establish a centre with the scale and ambition needed to address important challenges in cardiomyopathy research, creating new opportunities to connect discovery science with patient care, and help translate scientific advances into meaningful benefits for patients.” 

The Trustees of the Michael Uren Foundation said, “Sir Michael was a strong supporter of medical research throughout his long association with Imperial, and we are proud to continue that legacy. Cardiomyopathies affect many thousands of people and their families, and we hope this gift will give researchers the resources they need to better understand these conditions and find new ways to improve care.”