Published: 26 June 2018
Thanks to the wonderful generosity of the public and the tremendous dedication of our volunteers, supporters and staff, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) funds around £100 million of new research each year to understand the causes of heart and circulatory diseases, along with their risk factors, and to develop new treatments and cures.
As the Medical Director of the BHF, it is my responsibility to ensure we spend this money wisely and get the best possible value for our donors, patients and the public we wish to serve. One of the best ways of doing this is by creating partnerships and working collaboratively with other funders who share our vision.
I am therefore delighted to announce our new partnership with the NIHR. The NIHR, funded by the Department of Health, is a major funder of infrastructure for clinical research in the UK. It has done so in part by establishing Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs), which are themselves partnerships between hospital Trusts and Universities. Many of the BRCs have a substantial cardiovascular science portfolio, with over £41m committed to this research area over the next five years.
Furthermore, all 26 of the BHF Professors in England, and four of our Centres of Research Excellence, are based at universities and associated NHS Trusts that host BRCs with a major cardiovascular focus. Therefore it seems obvious that the BHF and NIHR should be working together to get the best out of our combined investment. Our new partnership aims to strengthen these existing links so we can do exactly that.
Bringing together the collective expertise and capabilities of the NIHR cardiovascular infrastructure with the BHF’s investment in BRC host organisations will open up significant new opportunities. One exciting area for me is in data science, which offers huge potential in improving the diagnosis and treatment of people with heart and circulatory diseases. The new initiative will also allow us to promote collaborative experimental medicine studies, foster new collaborative research programmes and leverage greater support from other external partners, including those in industry.
The NIHR-BHF Cardiovascular Partnership will also contribute to greater coordination between researchers, funders, professional bodies and patient groups. Our hope is that this will accelerate the adoption of new treatments and technologies, as well as contributing to greater research impact than we could achieve on our own.
Heart and circulatory diseases affect more than 7 million people in the UK alone. The forging of stronger links between the NIHR and BHF represents an important stepping stone towards our collective vision of reducing the burden of these conditions and the heartbreak they cause.