MRC & Asthma UK Centre in Allergic Mechanisms of Asthma

Allergy affects 1 in 6 people in the UK and Asthma affects 1 in 12 of the population in the UK, with 5.2 million people currently receiving treatment. The UK has one of the highest prevalences of asthma in young adults in Europe and the numbers of children reporting asthma symptoms has risen six fold over the last 30 years. Asthma costs the NHS an average of #889m per year and it is estimated that at least 12.7 million working days are lost due to asthma each year. This health and economic burden on the nation emphasizes the importance of research that tries to understand the diseases. The current proposal for a Centre brings together a group of doctors and scientists to discover new teatments and a cure for allergy and asthma.

The prevalence of allergic disease in the UK is amongst the highest in the world and that of asthma in young adults is the highest in Europe. The Centre is a partnership between the MRC, Asthma UK, Imperial and KCL. The mission of the Centre is to understand allergic mechanisms of asthma to inform the development of new treatments; to create a high quality environment for research training; and to be an authoritative voice on allergy and asthma in the public domain. In the last two years the Centre has successfully established a critical mass of researchers working co-ordinately in an internationally competitive unit for the benefits of health care. It has established core facilities, thereby focussing resources. The Centre has provided enhanced opportunities for new collaborative programmes of work to be started with even greater potential for more competitive funding, which would not otherwise be possible. The Centre has made substantial progress in each of the domains contained in its mission statement, namely in scholarship, training and public engagement. It has brought researchers together under an integrated strategy for allergy and asthma research which is unique in the UK.The research network has facilitated the conduct of translational science from the womb to adulthood and from the gene to the community.