A new Cambridge laboratory will measure fats in the blood to predict who will develop type 2 diabetes or heart disease years before symptoms appear. The problem is that most chronic diseases develop silently over decades, driven by subtle changes in how the body processes fats—called lipids. Doctors currently diagnose these conditions only after damage has already occurred. This laboratory aims to discover biomarkers: specific fat molecules that signal early metabolic trouble, long before a person feels unwell. It will also link these biomarkers to individual genetics, explaining why one person’s diet causes disease while another’s does not. If successful, the lab will make these biomarkers available to GPs and clinics, enabling routine blood tests that flag rising disease risk. People could then adjust their diet or lifestyle early enough to stay healthy, reducing hospital admissions for diabetes and heart disease. The lab will also build a public lipidomics database and train scientists worldwide in these techniques, accelerating the field beyond what any single group could achieve alone. This is applied fundamental science: the lab will both discover how fats drive disease and translate those discoveries into practical tools for healthcare.
View original technical description
The proposal sets out the vision of creating an MRC led, internationally distinctive laboratory which has the capability to discover and use biomarker techniques to study the role of fats on health and disease (lipidomics biomarker research). Biomarkers are substances that are characteristic for specific biological processes; means to examine organ function or other aspects of health. Modern practice in healthcare strongly moves from curing patient to disease prevention and early stage intervention, which helps to keep people out of the hospital and improve their quality of live and biomarkers play a crucial role herein. The development of many of today?s chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes or heart disease is caused by changes in how fats are metabolised by the body. The ability to measure these changes will enable people to change their lifestyle or diet before it is too late. It also will help to monitor if change in lifestyle or diet result in the reduction of health risks. People do not only develop heart disease by a bad diet, their genetics also plays a key role. Relating biomarkers to genes is essential to understand how diseases like diabetes and obesity arise on individual level. Biomarkers are also important to be able to measure how and which fats from the diet are metabolised. This will help to develop more suitable diets and understand how fats in diets can cause many of the now common diseases. Although many laboratories in the world are working on the role of fat in diet an disease, the unique role of this laboratory lies in the fact that it does not only focus on discovery but also on application. This means that discovered biomarkers become available to healthcare community. This centre of excellence will draw together worldwide expertise in the field, as well as utilising an already established scientific and clinical team based in Cambridge. The centre will not only pull together scientific and clinical expertise, but will also create a bioinformatics facility to collate and create a lipidomics database for use by others in the field. Providing a hub of new and emerging technologies within existing, well-established research groups, the centre will provide a unique teaching facility for scientists around the world to learn and develop the novel use of biomarker techniques.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know