The Medical Research Council is launching its first two Centres of Research Excellence, which will develop transformative new genomic therapeutics for currently untreatable diseases.
The MRC Centres of Research Excellence (MRC CoRE) will receive up to £50 million each over 14 years. The centres will build on the huge progress made in genomics, allowing the genetic basis of many diseases and processes to be identified. Advances in genome editing and other gene therapies have also made it possible to develop treatments for previously incurable conditions.
One centre, called the MRC/BHF CoRE in Advanced Cardiac Therapies, will be co-funded with the British Heart Foundation (BHF) and will focus on developing gene therapies for heart disease.
The other centre, called the MRC CoRE in Therapeutic Genomics, aims to make rare genetic disorders treatable by enabling the mass production of affordable cutting-edge gene therapies.
The MRC’s new CoRE funding model aims to transform biomedical and health research by revolutionising approaches to prevention, early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases by bringing together the very best researchers to tackle the challenge, wherever they are based. In addition, the centres will be beacons of excellence driving positive changes in research culture, and in training the next generation of pioneers in the field.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, Executive Chair of MRC, said: “The MRC CoREs are a new way of funding bold and ambitious science that seeks to advance our ability to understand diseases, diagnose them at an early stage, intervene with new treatments and prevent diseases of the future. They will focus on bringing together the brightest scientists to tackle diseases of major medical importance, so that they will really change the landscape and improve the health of the nation.
“I am excited to see how the first two centres will transform approaches in advanced therapeutics. We have seen the first green shoots of how advanced gene therapies could transform medicine, such as the mRNA Covid vaccines, or the recent announcement of the NHS approving a gene-editing therapy that could cure blood disorder thalassaemia. These two CoREs aim to bring these burgeoning technologies to mass fruition to treat many devastating diseases which will also lead to economic growth.”
The MRC/BHF CoRE in Advanced Cardiac Therapies aims to develop the first therapies to stimulate heart repair and regeneration in patients following a heart attack and in those with established heart failure, for which there are currently limited effective treatments.
The researchers aim to discover and target key processes within the heart tissue, which can stimulate the proliferation of heart muscle cells, encourage the growth of new blood vessels, and counteract the formation of scars.
Many of these regenerative processes have been identified as occurring naturally in the hearts of other animals, including salamanders and fish, and even in human infants. The centre aims to develop the first therapies that can reawaken these regenerative processes within the cells of damaged human hearts.
They plan to do this using therapies based on nucleic acids, the building blocks of our genetic material DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA). These will include messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to the cutting-edge techniques in the COVID-19 vaccines, and small regulatory RNAs. These will be identified through systematic, high throughput genetic screening.
The new MRC CoRE in Therapeutic Genomics aims to transform the diagnosis and treatment of genetic disorders by enabling the mass development of cutting-edge genetic therapies. They aim to develop therapies for many devastating genetic disorders that are currently untreatable.
Recent breakthroughs in genomics and the first generation of genetic therapies have begun to revolutionise the treatment of a few genetic disorders. However, the process to create, test, and approve each new therapy is too slow and expensive to enable treatments to be developed for the thousands of genetic disorders being diagnosed. To overcome this, the centre aims to develop processes to take successful genetic therapies and reprogramme them to treat new disorders.
The new centre will also use artificial intelligence approaches to enable scientists to process huge amounts of genetic data from patients at previously unimaginable depth.