London Olympics venue to house largest phenotypic facility

Singapore: The UK government is all set to create the world's first large-scale phenotyping facility, the MRC-NIHR Phenome Center. This center would be the product of a first-of-its-kind international public-private partnership and will have the potential to solve major diseases.

Waters Corporation will serve as a key technology partner in the innovative facility. Waters had earlier opened the first of what will be a global network of international food safety labs and more recently announced a partnership with the Irish National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training to deliver more effective biotherapeutic innovations. The National Phenome Center will act as a model for other national phenome centers, with the goal of establishing a network of National Phenome Centers across the world.

The facility will be housed in the re-purposed London Olympics 2012 Anti-Doping Science Center, leaving a lasting scientific legacy of the London Olympics. The MRC-NIHR Phenome Center will enable researchers to explore the characteristics of disease in order to develop new drugs and treatments for patients and in finding new, safer and more targeted treatments and accelerate the translation of medical discoveries into better healthcare.

The new center will be funded over five years by an investment of £5 million each from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Department of Health's National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and will build on and develop the state-of-the-art equipment and expertise of the London 2012 anti-doping facilities, which have been provided by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and operated by King's College London.

Professor Sir John Savill, chief executive, MRC, said that, "The GSK drug-testing facility at Harlow has taken one of the major challenges associated with this type of research, achieving high-throughput alongside forensic quality control to a new level, unprecedented anywhere in the world. Rather than losing this investment once the Games are over, the collaboration, involving the MRC, NIHR, UK universities, the NHS and NIHR Biomedical Research Centers, and industry leaders in the field, will provide a unique resource that will ultimately result in benefits for patients. This is a phenomenal legacy from the games."