The William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI) hosts a range of core facilities for research and clinical activities.
The Institute offers state-of-the-art core facilities, including the William Harvey Heart Centre, Genome Centre, a flow cytometry and cell sorting station, and in vivo imaging facilities. This includes recent investment in the establishment of 150m2 of new state-of-the-art in vivo confocal imaging capabilities.
The William Harvey Heart Centre is dedicated to tackling the growing burden of heart disease and stroke worldwide. Based at the Charterhouse Square campus, it represents a significant £25million investment that provides a flow of innovative new therapies from the laboratory to patients suffering from heart disease across north-east London and beyond.
A major attribute of the Heart Centre is the integration of laboratory work with patient engagement alongside a state of the art Clinical Trials Unit, which can run clinical studies in multiple therapeutic areas specialising in, but not limited to, cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrinology and rheumatology diseases.
The Heart Centre forms part of the National Institute of Health Research Barts Biomedical Research Centre (NIHR Barts BRC) and is specifically designed to provide the cardiovascular research hub for the £400million rebuild of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Our ethnically diverse east London community suffer appalling rates of heart disease, possibly due to undiscovered risk factors that may offer the basis for new treatments. Our strategic focus on translational therapeutic innovation will ensure that the William Harvey Heart Centre addresses areas of important unmet need with global healthcare implications.
The Clinical Research Centre (CRC) is part of the NIHR Barts BRC. Initially, the centre focused on blood pressure and cholesterol studies but has since widened its portfolio to include diabetes/renal, endocrine, respiratory and cognitive decline studies. The CRC runs a wide range of studies ranging from niche complex studies on rare diseases to large-scale trials and health service interventions.
The Centre also runs clinical trials in multiple therapeutic areas including investigational medicinal products (CTIMPS), device trials and observational studies.
We are involved in a number of patient and public engagement activities and work closely with GP practices serving approximately 500,000 people in east London.
Founded in 2000 the Genome Centre provides genetic and genomic research facilities to researchers within William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary and the wider Life Sciences research community.
Initial investment provided robotics, capillary sequencing and real-time PCR capability which we still support. Further investment in microarray has enabled the centre to support high-density SNP, Gene Expression and Methylation, followed by the adoption of Illumina's next-generation sequencing technology and the associated IT infrastructure. More recently, the centre rolled out library preps using the Fluidigm and targeted sequencing on the MiSeq.
With this portfolio of platforms the centre can facilitate studies of the genome, transcriptome and epigenome on any scale. The goal of the centre is to professionally partner all stages of genetic or genomic research projects, including project proposal, experimental design, training, technical support, analysis and interpretation of data.
The Human Performance Laboratory combines the expertise of sports and exercise medicine clinicians, surgeons, engineers and sports scientists to state-of-the-art physiological testing and motion analysis equipment. This collaborative venture offers clinical, educational, research and athlete support service applications in the laboratory or field based settings. The capabilities of the HPL cover musculoskeletal biomechanics and physiological testing. The laboratory is based on our Mile End campus.
The William Harvey Research Institute and the Digital Environment Research Institute are jointly developing a High Performance Computing (HPC) facility at Queen Mary, which will be in place by summer 2021.
The new HPC infrastructure will support research across the university, including existing projects involving the analysis of healthcare data collated through the Barts Bioresource and Genes and Health projects, and the development of Artificial Intelligence-based cardiac image computing to improve the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.
Michael Barnes, Professor of Bioinformatics and Director of the Centre for Translational Bioinformatics, said: "By combining innovative AI and HPC capacity with rich clinical data, we will have a real opportunity to address many of the clinical challenges, such as multi-morbidity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes that face the East London patient population."