Out partners

The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) funded the initial development of Phenome Centre Birmingham via an £8M award to create the current state-of-the-art metabolic phenotyping centre, providing capability to conduct flexi-scale metabolomics studies in medical research and stratified medicine.

MRC's contribution remains the core element of Phenome Centre Birmingham's research, and continues to support our growth and development of the centre, in turn providing outstanding opportunities for our customer's science.

The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) funded the initial development of Phenome Centre Birmingham via an £8M award to create the current state-of-the-art metabolic phenotyping centre, providing capability to conduct flexi-scale metabolomics studies in medical research and stratified medicine.

MRC's contribution remains the core element of Phenome Centre Birmingham's research, and continues to support our growth and development of the centre, in turn providing outstanding opportunities for our customer's science.

We are a member of Birmingham Health Partners (BHP), which links together the Birmingham Women and Children's NHS Foundation Trust (BWC), University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) and the University of Birmingham (UoB).

Through this partnership we work directly with clinicians in the field, supporting their research and promoting translation of our healthcare research findings into new diagnostics, drugs and devices for patients.

We work with the Institute of Translational Medicine (ITM) on strategic scientific projects of interest, validating and translating our research to turn medical science into innovative patient and healthcare system applications.

We work with the Institute of Metabolism and Systems Research (IMSR), driving world-leading research in metabolism.

Our training partner is the Birmingham Metabolomics Training Centre (BMTC), part of the University of Birmingham, which provides vocational training courses to empower the next generation of metabolomics researchers.

Key members of our team (Weber and Viant) co-founded the centre after identifying a significant gap and lack of availability of high-quality, consistant metabolomics courses, and are active trainers providing courses directly to delegates who are new in the field or wish to expand their understanding of metabolomics.

Phenome Centre Birmingham's Experimental Officers provide hands-on analytical and computational workshops for delegates, helping to deliver metabolomics training to scientists from over 240 organisations, across 46 countries, spanning academia, industry, government and NGO's.

The UK Consortium for MetAbolic Phenotyping (MAP/UK) partnership brings together a critical mass of methodological, analytical, and computational platforms, cooperating at a scale never previously achieved in the UK. The team, consisting of eight specialized research centres and the UK’s two Phenome Centres, aims to apply common standards, methods, and best practices to build a national resource benefiting UK researchers.

The MAP/UK mission:

1. Improve UK-wide phenotyping capability
2. Improve the quality of phenomics trianing available to UK-researchers
3. Enhance the quality of phenomics research
4. Improve the UK's capacity for phenomics research
5. Deliver UK-wide efficiency in the development of a harmonised phenomics platform
6. Provide case studies

The Technology Alliance Partnership (TAP) between Thermo Fisher Scientific and the University of Birmingham was formed in 2013 after almost a decade of collaboration, and was the first TAP between the company and an organisation within Europe.

This privileged status is pivotal in accelerating developments in the application of liquid chromatography - high resolution mass spectrometry to untargeted metabolomics, and through our partnership we continue to ensure that the metabolomics solutions we offer to our customers are cutting-edge.

Our partnership with Beckman Coulter has developed over 6 years, through which the metabolomics team at the University of Birmingham has become the company's international test site for automated sample preparation in metabolomic.

This exciting collaboration enables the growth and development of high-throughput metabolomics, using robotics to achieve outstanding accuracy and speed in sample preparation techniques.

Provision of seed instrumentation from Beckman Coulter to the University of Birmingham enables us to access the most cutting-edge, advanced technology and support services, as we rapidly develop our platform to provide opportunities for ultra-high scale studies.