A phenomenal legacy for London 2012

The London 2012 anti-doping facilities developed for the Olympic and Paralympic Games are being transformed into a £10 million ($16 million) world-class resource that could help revolutionise healthcare. The MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, the first of its kind in the world, will enable researchers to explore the characteristics of disease in order to develop new drugs and treatments for patients.
 

A phenome describes a person’s chemistry – all the molecules in their blood, urine or tissues – that are the result of their genetics and their lifestyle. This mixture of molecules is changing all the time and is influenced by factors such as diet, environment and even stress levels. It is linked to how a person responds to disease or to treatments such as drugs.
 

Researchers at the Centre will investigate the phenome patterns of patients and volunteers by analysing samples – usually blood or urine – very rapidly and on an unprecedented scale. This will help them to discover new ‘biomarkers’ to explain why one individual or population may be more susceptible to a disease than another. This knowledge will aid scientists in finding new, safer and more targeted treatments.
 

The new Centre will be funded over five years by an investment of £5 million each from the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and will build on and develop the state-of-the-art equipment and expertise of the London 2012 anti-doping facilities provided by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and operated by King’s College London.
 

The new Centre will be led by a collaboration of academic partners, including lead scientist Professor Jeremy Nicholson, whose team at Imperial have pioneered the use of analytical chemistry technologies such as mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance to study human health; and suppliers of nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry equipment, Bruker and Waters Corporation.