Biomedical brilliance

Medical breakthroughs that have changed – and saved – lives have come out of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC). The Centre turns scientific discoveries into treatments, diagnostics, and medical technologies for patients – and it is about to grow to almost double its size.

A thriving partnership that celebrated the milestone of 50 years this year is growing at an impressive rate, bringing biomedical breakthroughs into everyday patient care across the south.

The NIHR BRC is a longstanding partnership between the University of Southampton and the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust.

In October 2022, the NIHR announced a major funding boost of £25 million for the next five years for the Southampton BRC. It is an increase of more than 70 per cent on the £14.5 million the centre received in 2017 to 2022, and will enable the centre to build on its world-leading research and medical advancements.

Professor Mike Grocott, Director-Designate of Southampton NIHR BRC, Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine and former Vice President of the Royal College of Anaesthetists, said: “Southampton has a proven ability to translate discovery research into benefit for patients and the public, the health and care system, and the broader economy. Achieving the funding for the next five years was a tough competition and, at each stage, themes or institutions did not get through. I’m really delighted that Southampton has done so well. We have had a big uplift too, which is a huge vote of confidence from the NIHR.”

Bigger focus

Over the past five years, the BRC focused on nutrition and respiratory/critical care with cross-cutting themes in infection, data science, and behaviour change. This saw, for example, the BRC play a key role in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, with researchers across disciplines enhancing COVID-19 prevention, diagnostics, and treatments.

Enabled by the funding boost, which begins in December 2022, the BRC will expand to five ‘themes’, within which it will develop new treatments and diagnostics: Nutrition, Lifestyle and Metabolism; Respiratory and Allergy; Data, Health and Society; Microbiology, Immunology and Infection; and Perioperative and Critical Care.

Within these themes, areas of focus for the BRC in the immediate future include preconception nutritional screening; novel interventions for inflammatory lung diseases; air pollution and anti-allergy interventions; rapid diagnostics for infections; vaccines; and promoting physiological resilience before and after surgery.

Data science is also a priority, so researchers will be working to link different systems within a trusted research environment.

Mike outlined: “The growth to five themes will change the character of the BRC. We have focused on having a shared common vision and integrating that across the themes, putting a lot of focus on inclusion and collaboration.”

Prioritising people

Developing BRC researchers’ careers –while keeping patients front and centre – is at the heart of the BRC’s vision for the next five years.

“Our plans are very people-focused,” said Mike. “Our funding application was put together in collaboration with our Patient Council, which is integral to how we run the BRC at every level. We also have a big focus on training and career development for our researchers over the coming years – research is a people game, it’s about developing the next generation of researchers, so a lot of the funding is going into early and mid-career development.”

Leading on from this, the BRC is appointing an Equity Champion to lead on another priority – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.

“We are getting better at bringing people into the professions, but we are much less good at getting them into research and keeping them in research,” explained Mike. “There are many fewer female professors, for example. The same is true in terms of ethnicity. We are addressing this by focusing on open, transparent processes and ensuring all communities can access opportunities, particularly in terms of developing themselves through PhDs and postdoctoral roles.”

Concluding, Mike said: “There is a lot of hard work to be done, but through our plans, we will continue to change the lives of the people in Southampton, Wessex and beyond through the research we do.”

Find out more southamptonbrc.nihr.ac.uk

CASE STUDY: INVESTIGATING THE PORT’S IMPACT

Southampton is home to one of the UK’s major ports. It is the busiest cruise terminal and one of the largest container ports in the UK. But what impact might that be having on the city’s residents’ health? A project at the NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) Southampton Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) is finding out.

The Port of Southampton is a hive of activity. With five cruise terminals and an extremely busy cargo port, the numbers of ships, lorries, cars, and machinery using the port are high –with inevitable emissions associated with each and every one.

A project led by BRC researcher Dr Matthew Loxham is investigating the potential effects of emissions from the port on respiratory health.

He said: “Particulate matter – the dust particles in the air – is regulated and monitored based on quantity, but that doesn’t take into account the different sources of particles, which vary hugely. There is the potential for these particles, as they are so different from one another, to have very different impacts on your health.”

Matthew’s project began in 2018 when a big focus on ‘Clean Air Zones’ in cities was emerging. “Cars and road vehicles have received the lion’s share of the attention,” he said. “But in cities with ports, there hasn’t been the same focus on the emissions of ships and the industries they bring. We wanted to find out what the characteristics of port emissions are, and whether they might pose more or less of a risk to health than road vehicles.”

Matthew and PhD student Natasha Easton used a device called a High Volume Cascade Impactor (HVCI) to collect particle samples at different sites in Southampton and filter them according to size. They took samples at the University’s Boldrewood Innovation Campus (for a non-dock location), a dock gate where HGVs arrive and depart, a cruise ship terminal, a cargo ship terminal, and next to a large metal scrap pile.

The HVCI filters particles according to where they would land within the respiratory system, roughly corresponding to the upper airways, lower airways, and deeper parts of the lung where gases enter and leave the blood, respectively.

“We chemically analysed these particles, which showed that these different sites provided particles with different compositions associated with both their sources and their size,” said Matthew.

Biological responses

The project team is investigating the biological responses to the particles they collected using cellular models of the airways and the alveoli to represent the tissues, on a dish.

“We have found that there are some clear differences in how the cells respond, depending on the size and source of the particles,” said Matthew. “Exposure to particulate matter air pollution, in general, is associated with exacerbations of respiratory diseases such as asthma, COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) and idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Even people in good health might find themselves experiencing a tight chest, cough, itchy nose, or dry eyes, on days when particulate matter levels are high.

“Longer term – or chronic – exposure, from a year up to a lifetime, is now beginning to be associated with an increased risk of developing some of these diseases. But we don’t yet know the extent to which exposure to air pollution causes these diseases. We also don’t understand the extent to which particulate matter from different sources may result in quantitatively or quantitatively different effects on health.”

Enabled by the NIHR Southampton BRC’s partnership between the University and the University Hospital Southampton, as well as collaborations with the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute, the School of Ocean and Earth Science, and the Faculty of Engineering, Matthew and his team have been able to collect and monitor the air pollution that people are exposed to, as well as understanding some of its potential biological effects. Through the BRC, they now aim to look at how these exposures may be associated with different clinical outcomes, and how this might happen.

Matthew is developing a programme of work that will study the associations between various aspects of air pollution exposure and lung disease, and further refine it to look at specific sources of emissions.