Establishing MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, a world leading high-throughput metabolic phenotyping centre for humanpopulation disease-risk biomarker discovery.

We are setting up a new national centre to examine tens of thousands of human blood, and urine samples for the huge variety of chemicals that are found in our bodies. Some of those chemicals are made by ourselves and others originate from our diet, medicines and even pollutants.

The purpose of doing this is to link the chemicals that we find in our bodies to different disease risk factors and to improve their prevention, diagnosis and treatment. This work will help us to understand the complexity of health and disease and will enhance our understanding of the interactions between peoples' genes, their lifestyle and their environment. This work will help us develop ways to make sure that everyone gets exactly the right treatment they need depending on their own genetics, lifestyle and other conditions they may have.

Measuring the tiny quantities of these compounds requires expert researchers and highly specialised equipment. It also requires sophisticated statistical and computer analysis to identify which of the many thousands chemicals are the most important predictors of disease. The Centre will build on existing expertise and infrastructure at Imperial and will enable us to make it available to others. We are working with other scientsits at King's College London, and experts from the equipment companies to set up the new centre, which will give all researchers in the UK access to these state-of-the-art facilities and expert scientists, and will train new researchers for the future.

This new centre is the first such facility in the world that can do parallel high throughput analysis of samples on this scale and will lead the way in setting standards for other countries that are setting up similar centres. The research that is undertaken in the centre will also help develop the technologies to be more cost effective and environmentally friendly.

By establishing this national centre, Imperial will be able to build on its world-leading expertise and work with other researchers to investigate a wider range of diseases and disease risks, and will speed up developments in their treatment, diagnosis and prevention.

We are establishing the MRC-NIHR Phenome Centre, a world leading high-throughput metabolic phenotyping centre for human population disease-risk biomarker discovery. It will offer the scientific community a unique capability in targeted and exploratory metabolic phenotyping and assay development, as well as a computational medicine capability for the provision of data, models and physiological interpretation.

Metabolic phenotypes (metabotypes) are strongly influenced by both host genes and environment, and their interaction. A multitude of factors modify the metabotype of both individuals and populations. These include gender, age, diet, gut microbiome, physical activity, latent disease, hormone and stress levels, as well as xenobiotics, such as medications, plasticisers, food preservatives, pesticides, and plant secondary metabolites such as caffeine, flavinoids and phytoestrogens.

Biofluids, such as blood and urine, carry detailed metabolic and homeostatic information, providing a top-down 'systems biology' readout of the biochemical, physiological, dietary and environmental exposures of individuals. By taking advantage of the new -'omics' technologies, the end-products and consequences of these external challenges and internal responses ('the exposome') can be captured. Cross-integration of genetic and metabolic phenotype data will aid patient stratification through discovery of novel disease and prognostic biomarkers and better understanding of responses to treatment and novel therapies.

The MRC-NIHR National Phenome Centre will provide, at scale, the ability to analyse both patient- and population-based samples for biomarker discovery and validation, improved patient stratification through development of robust diagnostic and prognostic markers, and early identification of drug efficacy, safety and other responses to treatments. The Centre will provide a service to the scientific community providing high-throughput analysis of their samples, providing unprecedented scale, quality control and reproducibility and will also engage in academic collaboration for some of the projects requiring complex data analysis and interpretation.

The facility will comprise state-of-the-art Mass Spectrometry (MS) and high field Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) facilities at Imperial, and will be supported by strategic alliances with King's College London and major instrument suppliers of both MS (The Waters Corporation) and NMR (Bruker Biospin GmbH).

The establishment of the Phenome Centre will be one of the most important developments in applied analytical science in teh UK in a generation. It will be transformational in the scale of what can be achieved. It will create a template for international harmonisation of the approach to metabolic phenotyping and its methodologies, for the first time making data at this level comparable across institutions. Finally the R&D input from the Centre's technology partners will transform the instrumentation and methods for analytical chemistry by undertaking R&D to develop new analytical methods, establish novel approaches to computational multivariate analyses and to develop the technology, eg to increase the throughput and reduce environmental impact.