A partnership led by the Medical Research Council (MRC) will invest over £230 million in a range of revolutionary technologies aimed at identifying the causes of diseases such as cancer and dementia, and dramatically speeding up diagnosis and treatment. The technologies will be used to find out how differences in the cellular and molecular make-up of people affect how they respond to disease and treatment.
The Clinical Research Infrastructure Initiative will bring together funding from UK Government, devolved administrations, Arthritis Research UK, British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research UK, to advance clinical research in 23 key projects at centres across the country, including research teams at 15 universities. Many of these will involve partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
A number of the funded projects will enable the UK to maintain its position at the forefront of medical imaging technology. The UK has played a major role in pioneering the use of these technologies in the last 30-40 years and is home to many of the leading experts in the field. The funding will bring some of the most sophisticated imaging technologies in the world into UK clinical research and then develop the techniques still further using the UK’s expertise in this area.
Combining imaging technologies such as 7Tesla ‘ultrahigh-field’ MRI with other innovative research techniques will give scientists an ever more detailed view of what’s happening within the body. There are around 40 machines worldwide but only two of these are in the UK (Oxford and Nottingham). The CRII funding will provide two new scanners and upgrade the Nottingham machine. The technology is particularly important in brain research because it can look at small changes in the structure, function and chemistry of the brain even before diseases such as dementia start.
Cardiff University has secured a total of £6.7m for the same 7Tesla MRI technology. This will be used to investigate the causes and treatments of dementia and other brain conditions such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease and multiple sclerosis. The proposed research will also link the discovery of genetic factors associated with brain disease to detailed assessments of brain structure and function made with the 7T MRI system. This will give a clearer picture of underlying disease mechanisms.
Teams from the University of Leeds and the University of York are developing a new imaging method (SABRE) that has the potential to increase the signal in an MRI image by up to 100,000 times. The £7.6m investment will magnetically ‘label’ specific molecules so that they can be visualised as they pass through the body without changing their role. With this technique it is possible to label both drugs and substances that occur naturally in the body, making the method widely applicable. Ultimately the method is expected to work with any hospital MRI scanner. The technique could be applied to patients with heart disease, cancer and joint disease within five years and will help speed up the development of new drugs.
