Nottingham secures £4.6 million investment for research
Researchers at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trusts (NUH) have received over £4.6million investment in new equipment to support their world-leading research.
The funding is part of £96 million awarded by the National Institute for Health & Care Research (NIHR) to 93 NHS organisations across England in the summer and is confirmed in NUH’s Research & Innovation Annual Report for 2022/23, published this week.
The money is being invested in new CT scanning capacity, specialist equipment including for the Nottingham BioResource Service which stores over 160,000 samples for research, and other technology over the next two years. It comes after over £26m of investment in Nottingham’s research was awarded by the NIHR in 2022.
Professor Stephen Ryder, Co-Director of Research & Innovation, said: “Our aim for the future is to make more investment in people – education, training and grant funding – to support new healthcare professionals to develop their own research at NUH.
We are ambitious for our research to grow and to speed-up our discoveries so that more patients in Nottingham and across the country can benefit from better health, innovative healthcare and the best possible treatments for them and their families.
Here in Nottingham, we are fortunate to have well-established partnerships with our universities, our NHS and local government colleagues and with industry. We are working together to make new research possible.”
Last year, almost 14,000 people took part in clinical research at NUH. With extra funding and a rising challenge of increasing life expectancy for people living in Nottingham and surrounding areas, researchers are making it easier to take part in research by taking their research out on the road, using a new purpose-designed Mobile Research Unit.
The Research & Innovation Annual Report highlights new developments from NUH clinicians which will help patients in our hospitals like a new highly nutritious ice cream, designed to enable older people to recover better, and research involving former professional footballers to better understand knee and ankle injuries.
It also tells the story of some of the next generation of researchers to develop their careers at NUH. One of those is Dr Akram Hosseini, a Consultant Neurologist, who started her research journey only four years ago using powerful (Ultrahigh Field at 7T) Magnetic Resonance Imaging to study the sub-millimetre and molecular changes of small structures in patients’ brains to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease earlier.
Since then, she has used Nottingham’s expertise in 7-Tesla MRI as part an international study investigating possible links between COVID-19 and dementia.
Dr Hosseini explains how a national funding grant, and the support from NUH set her off on her research career at NUH: “National funding provided me with the protected research time to enhance my research skills and experience. It allowed me to integrate research into my clinical practice in dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.”
Dr Hosseini is one of over 100 early career researchers over the last year through NUH and the University of Nottingham in the flagship NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre.