Accelerating patient access to new innovative medicines and technologies is at the heart of the University of Birmingham’s research. Working through Birmingham Health Partners, we improve patient care and wellbeing by translating laboratory discoveries into rapid changes in clinical practice, as well as facilitating insights from patients and clinicians to inform our research.
Birmingham can do this at a pace, scale and efficiency that is unrivalled in the UK. Globally, we are one of the few campuses equipped to deliver the full circle of translational medicine.
The University possesses world-class clinical trials capabilities that help to bring lifesaving medicines and techniques to market. The Birmingham Health Partners campus houses a wealth of multidisciplinary research expertise – including many national and international Centres of Excellence – as well as two large NHS Trust hospitals.
Our facilities support every stage of the innovation cycle and our transformative improvements to healthcare are driven by a strong foundation of academic excellence and a proactive approach to partnership and co-creation in delivering clinical advancements.
Download our Healthcare Innovation Factsheet (pdf)
Birmingham is recognised across life and environmental sciences and healthcare innovation as a global leader, translating science into societal advancements. Through strong partnerships that link pioneering academic excellence with clinical and industry innovation, we address the challenges facing society today and those of the future global population. We do this by working collaboratively with a broad range of businesses, government departments, research councils and governing bodies in sport both in the UK and overseas.
Enabling Technologies at Birmingham
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Birmingham Precision Medicine Centre (BPMC)
An innovative, end-to-end partnership for the delivery of precision medicine, underpinned by our clinical expertise and excellence in academic research, Birmingham Precision Medicine Centre has been designed to deliver a flexible and comprehensive service to address industry needs for translational medicine. Whether co-designing trials, performing complex ‘omics’ analysis or developing companion diagnostic tools – BPMC is able to support, enable and facilitate every step of the drug development pipeline, with complete life-cycle academic overview and study design support to address specific needs and requests.
In a highly competitive marketplace, with reducing returns from R&D and average costs of bringing a drug to market of $2bn, alongside business models such as ‘pay-for-performance’ pricing or post-licensing adoption and evaluation, developing products in an efficient, patient-focused way is a growing challenge.
In particular, bringing together the right stakeholders, across function and expertise, represents one of the areas where research and development can fail.
The Birmingham Precision Medicine Centre (BPMC) is a unique, state-of-the-art centre, providing access to the expertise of key opinion leaders on clinical trial design and biological sample investigation, designed to deliver a flexible and comprehensive service to address industry needs for translational medicine.
The team offers a comprehensive trials diagnostic platform that can provide the highest levels of clinical quality management in regulatory-standard delivery and analysis.
By integrating expertise, services and stakeholders, we can significantly shorten development and delivery timescales and hence reduce the cost of drug development.
Professor Wraith, Professor of Immunology and Director of the Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy discusses the work of the Birmingham Precision Medicine Centre (BPMC), an innovative end-to-end clinical and academic partnership for the development of precision medicine.
Download our related Factsheet for Stratified Medicine Lab (pdf)
PIONEER - The Health Data Research Hub for Acute Care
PIONEER - links, for the first time, acute healthcare data from primary care (GPs, pharmacies and out of hours GP services), secondary care (NHS hospitals) and the ambulance service across the West Midlands, to follow an individual’s acute care journey across the community and hospital healthcare providers.
This joined-up approach is helping our experts to understand how, where and why people seek unplanned medical help, and what happened to them along the way. Understanding this journey offers the opportunity to identify critical points where health care could have been provided or health needs responded to in a different way, potentially supporting earlier diagnosis, new treatments and monitoring systems and changing how services are run.
Hear more from Professor Elizabeth Sapey, Professor of Acute and Respiratory Medicine and Managing Director of NIHR Clinical Research Facility Birmingham
Birmingham Health Innovation Campus (BHIC)
The West Midlands has the second largest cluster of healthcare technologies SMEs in the country. Government investment is needed to support businesses to rapidly innovate and translate ideas to the clinic, creating new jobs and improving health.
In October 2020 it was announced that Birmingham is set to lead the delivery of medical innovation in the Midlands through the development of Birmingham Health Innovation Campus; attracting significant inward investment, creating high value jobs in the region, and accelerating the development and deployment of new drugs, diagnostics and healthcare technologies to patients.
The development of the 10-acre site is being delivered through a long-term collaboration between the University and the UK’s leading property provider for the science and technology sector, Bruntwood SciTech, a 50:50 joint venture between Bruntwood and Legal & General.
BHIC is set to drive:
- Rapid co-development, evaluation and translation of new, data-enabled therapeutics (through Birmingham Precision Medicine Centre) and medical technologies
- Closer engagement between industry, clinicians and academics – delivering new research and commercialisation opportunities
- High-value job creation and inward investment
- Patient benefit, through early access to these healthcare innovations
- New care pathways for the NHS, in the city and beyond
- Sustained local economic growth
Download the latest BHIC Project Update pdf to learn more about our plans, including the Resilience in Supply Chains for Med Tech Manufacturing (ReSCue) project, which will support manufacturing businesses and supply chains to diversify, scale-up and increase their resilience.
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Learn more
Birmingham Health Partners (BHP) is a strategic alliance between the University of Birmingham and two NHS Foundation Trusts - Birmingham Women’s & Children’s and University Hospitals Birmingham - which transcends organisational boundaries to rapidly translate healthcare research findings into new diagnostics, drugs and devices for patients.
Contact the University of Birmingham’s business engagement team with your business challenges so we can match our research insights and expert analysis to issues affecting you businessteam@contacts.bham.ac.uk