Imperial College to build £99m health science centre in London
13 May 2009
A new £99 million facility dedicated to finding new ways of treating
people with serious health problems, including heart and circulatory
diseases, is being built in West London.
The new six-storey building is due to be in use from December 2011
and it will form a key part of the Academic Health Science Centre, which
is a unique partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial
College Healthcare NHS Trust that aims to bring new therapies and
treatments to patients much more quickly than ever before.
Over 450 world-class researchers and clinicians from the College and
the Trust will be working together in the new facility to develop better
therapies for conditions such as heart failure, artery disease,
arthritis, diabetes and obesity. The development will be partly funded
by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.
The project will be the largest construction contract ever placed by
Imperial College London. The Rector of the College, Sir Roy Anderson,
said at the start of the demolition of old buildings on the site: “The
part of the campus that we are standing in today is going to look very
different in a few years’ time. These old out-dated blocks will be gone
and in their place we will have a new building specifically designed to
encourage the translation of research findings into benefits for
patients. It will enable us to bring a critical mass of scientists,
clinicians and patients under one roof, focusing on major health
challenges in many areas and in particular cardiovascular medicine.
“I am very proud that Imperial has led the way in bringing the
concept of the Academic Health Science Centre to the UK. It is a very
different approach to university-hospital partnerships in this country.
At its heart is the desire to sweep away the barriers between the two
and move exciting new medical findings quickly from the laboratory to
the hospital ward. Our new facility will play a key part in this,” added
Sir Roy.
Lord Tugendhat, Chairman of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust,
said: "This new facility represents one of the largest investments in
translational research in Europe. It will house hundreds of scientists
and clinicians working together to tackle some of the most serious
health challenges we face, including heart disease, arthritis, diabetes
and obesity. Our unique partnership will pave the way for new
discoveries and treatments to be translated into better patient care and
outcomes quicker than ever before."
The new building will include:
- one of Europe’s largest heart research facilities: the building
will contain one of the largest cardiovascular research facilities
in Europe and will provide the headquarters for the British Heart
Foundation Centre of Research Excellence at Imperial. Three hundred
cardiovascular scientists and physicians will occupy three floors of
laboratories and offices, exploring areas including how to harness
stem cells to combat heart attacks and heart failure. Heart and
circulatory disease is the leading cause of death in the UK.
- new clinical research facility: the ground floor of the new
building will be devoted to a new Wellcome Trust Clinical Research
Facility. Here, patients from the adjacent hospital facilities at
Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust and beyond, and healthy
volunteers, will take part in studies to better understand disease
processes and develop and evaluate new treatments for health
problems including cardiovascular disease, cancer, and neurological
and psychiatric conditions;
- new scanning equipment to explore how therapies and diseases are
working: researchers will use a new imaging unit on the lower ground
floor of the building to scan patients and volunteers, to explore
how effective different therapies are and to analyse how different
diseases are working in the body. This Translational Medicine
Imaging Unit will include a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner
and a positron emission tomography (PET) CT scanner; and
- genetics of conditions including arthritis, diabetes and
obesity: on another floor, experts from the Medical Research Council
Clinical Sciences Centre will be looking at the genetic variations
involved in conditions such as arthritis, diabetes and obesity, in
order to explore new ways of preventing and treating these
conditions.
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