HSC R&D Division has provided significant funding to support the following Research Programmes:
HSC R&D Division contributing funding to the Belfast-Manchester Movember Centre of Excellence (at Queen's University Belfast and Manchester University) established by Movember and Prostate Cancer UK to bring leading researchers across different scientific disciplines together to tackle important unanswered questions and move research towards patient benefit as quickly as possible and change the future for men with prostate cancer. The Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology at QUB, specialises in stratified medicine (tailoring treatments to the patient groups who will respond best) and Biomarker discovery – identifying gene and protein signatures of risk and response to therapy. The research at the Belfast-Manchester Centre of Excellence focused on recurrent prostate cancer to identify which men are more likely to be susceptible to recurrent disease in advance of their primary treatment aiming to prevent recurrence by improving and refining radiotherapy treatments. This could also identify men at low risk, who may be spared more extreme therapy. For more information please see Movember Belfast-Manchester Centre of Excellence
The Centre of Excellence for Public Health at QUB was one of five Centres of Excellence established across the UK in 2008 as part of a £20 million investment across the UK to strengthen research into complex public health issues such as obesity and health inequalities. In 2013, the Centre was awarded a further 5 years funding which will enable its team to advance their research on what shapes the health and wellbeing of adolescents in schools, on developing better interventions to improve public health and on the broader social and economic forces that help us all "age" well. The funding partners included British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, National Institute of Health Research, Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council, HSC R&D Division, National Institute for Social Care and Health Research (Welsh Assembly Government) & Wellcome Trust.
The NI Centre for Stratified Medicine was an £11.5 million collaborative project between the University of Ulster’s Biomedical Sciences Research Institute, C-TRIC (the Clinical Translational Research and Innovation Centre) and the Western Health and Social Care Trust. The Centre, based in C-TRIC at Altnagelvin Area Hospital, has a focus on personalised medicine approaches to managing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and stroke, diabetes, bone disorders, inflammatory diseases, mental health, dementia and cancer. Stratified or personalised medicine is an emerging practice of medicine which examines our genetic make-up along with clinical data to better prevent, diagnose and treat disease at an individual patient level. In addition to undertaking cutting edge stratified medicine research, the Centre offers an undergraduate degree course in Stratified Medicine. The funding partners included HSC R&D Division (£1.5m), Invest Northern Ireland (£5.6m) and the Ulster University (£4.4m).
The Institute for Child care Research (ICCR) at QUB (including the Youth Development Study) aimed to influence the development of child care policy and practice through identifying and conducting high quality research and through promoting the use of the best available findings. It was established in 1995. It received core funding from HSC R&D Division up until 2016.
The Nucleic Acid Extraction Centre (NAEC) was funded (2001-2009) to accept blood and other tissues for DNA/RNA extraction storage with a quality assured process (spectrophotometry, gel electrophoresis, PCR and dHPLC) and provide a database of samples received and distributed.