Establishing MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, a world leading high-throughput metabolic phenotyping centre for humanpopulation disease-risk biomarker discovery.
A new national centre will screen tens of thousands of blood and urine samples for the hundreds of chemicals our bodies produce, ingest from food, or absorb from medicines and pollutants. The problem is that disease risk is shaped by a complex mix of genetics, lifestyle, and environment, but researchers lack the tools to measure all these chemical signals at once. Current methods are too slow and small-scale to link specific chemical profiles to conditions like diabetes, heart disease, or cancer across large populations. If the centre succeeds, it will give UK researchers access to the world’s first facility capable of high-throughput metabolic phenotyping at this scale. By identifying which chemicals are the strongest predictors of disease, the work could improve early diagnosis, enable personalised treatments tailored to an individual’s genetics and lifestyle, and help prevent illness before it starts. The centre will also train new researchers and develop cheaper, greener analytical technologies, setting international standards for similar facilities elsewhere. The research is applied: its primary goal is to speed up disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment by making metabolic profiling a routine tool in population health.
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We are setting up a new national centre to examine tens of thousands of human blood, and urine samples for the huge variety of chemicals that are found in our bodies. Some of those chemicals are made by ourselves and others originate from our diet, medicines and even pollutants. The purpose of doing this is to link the chemicals that we find in our bodies to different disease risk factors and to improve their prevention, diagnosis and treatment. This work will help us to understand the complexity of health and disease and will enhance our understanding of the interactions between peoples' genes, their lifestyle and their environment. This work will help us develop ways to make sure that everyone gets exactly the right treatment they need depending on their own genetics, lifestyle and other conditions they may have. Measuring the tiny quantities of these compounds requires expert researchers and highly specialised equipment. It also requires sophisticated statistical and computer analysis to identify which of the many thousands chemicals are the most important predictors of disease. The Centre will build on existing expertise and infrastructure at Imperial and will enable us to make it available to others. We are working with other scientsits at King's College London, and experts from the equipment companies to set up the new centre, which will give all researchers in the UK access to these state-of-the-art facilities and expert scientists, and will train new researchers for the future. This new centre is the first such facility in the world that can do parallel high throughput analysis of samples on this scale and will lead the way in setting standards for other countries that are setting up similar centres. The research that is undertaken in the centre will also help develop the technologies to be more cost effective and environmentally friendly. By establishing this national centre, Imperial will be able to build on its world-leading expertise and work with other researchers to investigate a wider range of diseases and disease risks, and will speed up developments in their treatment, diagnosis and prevention.
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