University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre

Our BRC is a partnership between one of the UK s leading NHS hospitals, University College London Hospitals (UCLH) and one of the world s leading Universities, University College London (UCL).

Our vision is to ensure that advances in medical science led by our scientists and clinicians, are best used to develop new diagnostic tests and better treatments for patients across the whole NHS. Our BRC-leadership team is diverse, so that we can better represent the people we serve.

Our BRC is also large, and our aims are bold, because that is what it takes to tackle some of the most serious and life-threatening diseases, where we believe we can make a big difference to patient outcomes.

These include cancer, dementia, heart disease and strokes, brain and nervous system diseases such as multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, muscular dystrophy, Parkinson s disease and epilepsy.

We will also develop better treatments for mental health problems, hearing and dental problems, and diseases caused by inflammation, such as chronic lung, joint and bowel diseases. The Covid-19 pandemic has inevitably influenced our strategy. UCL and UCLH have been amongst the most research-active centres in the world during the pandemic.

Our BRC will focus on important areas of medical research highlighted by the pandemic, such as infectious diseases and our immune systems, intensive care medicine, obesity, and the impact of population diversity and deprivation on the risk of diseases and their response to treatment. During the pandemic, the public has embraced research like never before.

We must build on that enthusiasm, helping more people to take part in research in a national effort to improve people s lives. Medicine is facing a revolution in data and technology. The NHS can lead in this, or be left behind. Our BRC strategy is designed to help the NHS to lead.

Our Computational Medicine theme brings together world-leading teams of mathematicians, computer scientists, software engineers, artificial intelligence and genetics, to safely use NHS data in ways it has rarely been used before, linking it to other data, such as genetic and environmental data, to really help understand why some people get certain diseases and why others don t, and why some diseases often occur together in the same person, so called “multi-morbidity”.

Working with colleagues across the country, we will use this new knowledge to help the NHS better predict who is at risk of certain diseases, enabling us to develop and offer more personalised healthcare, to prevent diseases developing, and more effective treatments for when they do.

We will also test ways to use artificial intelligence and technology in hospitals, to help doctors and nurses analyse complex information quickly and take the correct decisions faster, making hospitals more efficient and safer.

We can do this at pace and at scale, by building on what we have achieved in the past 5-years, developing new and better diagnostic tests for many diseases, and new treatments for cancer and other serious diseases, all of which have transformed patients lives, across the NHS and beyond.