BHF-funded research is behind many of the advances that are giving people with heart and circulatory diseases longer, better lives. Despite this progress, 420 people in the UK still die every day because of heart and circulatory diseases. By investing in research, we are supporting scientists to make the life-saving discoveries that will prevent more deaths.
Sometimes it takes more than a one-off project to find the answers, which is why we began the Research Excellence Awards in 2008. These awards provide a large pool of funding to enable each recipient to become a world-class centre of cardiovascular research. We launched the Research Excellence Awards with a £34 million investment into four research centres based at UK universities - University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London and King’s College London.
Since then, we have invested a further £86 million, bringing the total investment since the awards began to a staggering £120 million. We now also support a further four research centres through these awards – University College London, University of Cambridge, University of Leicester and University of Manchester.
Since 2019 the Research Excellence Awards have included another initiative - Accelerator Awards of £1 million each over 5 years, given to fuel universities to develop their cardiovascular research programmes to their full potential.
What makes the awards special?
The Research Excellence Awards, and Accelerator Awards, allow experts from diverse fields to come together to tackle the biggest questions in heart and circulatory disease research. From biologists to engineers, clinicians to mathematicians: these varied perspectives and knowledge foster innovative, high-quality thinking. Rather than award money to a specific project (like most other funding awarded by the BHF), the Research Excellence and Accelerator Awards allow institutions to use funds flexibly and where it is needed most, allowing the most innovative research to rapidly get off the ground.
The awards will also help to secure the UK’s future as a world-leader in heart and circulatory disease research, by empowering our universities to attract and nurture the very best talent into the field and encourage the exploration of new ideas.
Our Centres of Research Excellence
Each of the universities below received a Research Excellence Award in 2024, supporting them to undertake innovative science and break down boundaries in heart and circulatory disease research over the next five years:
Led by Professor Martin Bennett, the team aim to:
- Identify new disease risk factors
- Investigate the role of inflammation in heart and circulatory diseases
- Better understand cardiometabolic syndromes.
They’ll use varied approaches including genomics and the use of large datasets from population studies.
Under the leadership of Professor Keith Channon, the centre will work in three key areas:
- Development of new research and diagnostic tools, including those that use artificial intelligence
- Discovery of new drug targets
- Heart development and regeneration.
Professor Ajay Shah will lead the centre in its efforts to bring together an interdisciplinary team that focuses on the prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and personalised therapy for heart failure.
Led by Professor Manuel Mayr, the team will work across several areas including:
- Blood vessel diseases
- The potential of wearable sensors such as smartwatches to develop tools that tell us about an individual’s cardiovascular health.
Professor David Newby will lead the centre in efforts to create a collaborative, multidisciplinary institute. Scientists will focus on:
- Diabetes and metabolic syndrome in cardiovascular disease
- Imaging damage to large blood vessels and heart valves
- Cardiovascular healthcare data science.
Professor G André Ng will lead the programme focused on three main areas:
- Using genetic tools to improve diagnosis and prevention of cardiovascular disease
- Developing and testing new treatments for cardiovascular disease
- Understanding the links between cardiovascular diseases and other common conditions.
Led by Professor Bernard Keavney, BHF Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, researchers will focus on science that:
- Addresses disparities in cardiovascular health
- Better understands a range of heart and circulatory diseases including congenital heart disease, high blood pressure, and heart failure.
Professor Perry Elliott will lead research into several key areas, including:
- Early phase clinical trials in rare diseases and cardiac arrhythmia
- A simulation lab and robotics programme
- Producing models of social, economic and genetic determinants of ethnic differences in cardiovascular health.
The University of Leicester, University of Manchester, and University College London each received an Accelerator Award from BHF in 2019. Building on this strong foundation, these institutes became BHF Centres of Research Excellence in 2024, underscoring their exceptional contributions to cardiovascular research.
Accelerator Award Recipients
Accelerator Awards, launched in 2019, provide £1 million in funding to enable leading research institutes to fully develop their cardiovascular research programmes.
Led by Professor Khalid Naseem, researchers will investigate the ways in which type 2 diabetes contributes to heart and circulatory diseases. The institute will invest significant funding into the development of the brightest early-career researchers, expanding their community of cardiovascular scientists.
The impact that these awards have
The Research Excellence and Accelerator Awards have already helped to fund cutting-edge science that has the potential to improve and save lives. Just some examples of the innovative research to have come out of the centres so far include:
- Work from Professor David Newby and his team in Edinburgh, who discovered that a simple scan could save thousands of lives each year, by improving the diagnosis of people coming to hospital with chest pains
- A new biodegradable gel, developed by researchers at the University of Manchester, that could be delivered to the heart and help to repair damage
- The identification of a new risk factor for congenital heart disease (CHD): researchers at the University of Oxford have found that iron deficiency anaemia in pregnancy can significantly increase the chances of a baby being born with CHD. The research also found that giving iron supplements early in pregnancy could greatly reduce this risk.